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LIBRARY  OF  THE  THEOLOGICAL  SEMINARY 

PRINCETON,  N.  J. 

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0F 

L  OCT  18  126 

y/Av  vv 

Is  God  a  Personality? 


BY 


DR.  CHARLES  W.  SOUIRES,  S.T.D. 

/"W  ' 

Author  of  “Miinsterberg  and  Militarism,”  etc. 


1923 


TO  THE  BELOVED  AND  REVERED  MEMORY 

OF 

s  BORDEN  P.  BOWNE,  Ph.D.,  LL.D. 

THIS  BOOK  IS  DEDICATED 


PREFACE 


In  the  midst  of  the  modern  deluge  of  litera¬ 
ture,  there  is  only  one  adequate  excuse  for  offer¬ 
ing  to  the  serious  public  a  short  work  of  this 
kind,  and  this  is  the  scarcity  of  volumes  on  the 
subject  of  personality  and  the  almost  universal 
tendency  of  thoughtful  writers  to  avoid  the  effort 
of  showing  the  validity  of  this  essential  attribute 
of  the  Divine  Being.  The  deduction  of  this  cate¬ 
gory,  only  here  attempted,  is  well  within  the  reach 
of  modern  intellectual  endeavor. 


C.  W.  S. 


PRINTERS 

NICHOLS-ELLIS  PRESS,  INC. 
LYNN.  MASS.  U.  S.  A. 


TABLE  OF  CONTENTS 


i 

INTRODUCTION 

II 

THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 

1.  Spirituality 

2.  Personality 

(i)  Personality  in  Man 

(ii)  Personality  in  God 

(a)  Limitation  an  Objection 

(b)  Anthropomorphism 

III 

ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY 

1.  Block  Universe 

2.  Abstraction  of  Personality 

3.  Man  and  God  Deprived  of  Morality 


IV 

CONCLUSION 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 

I 

Introduction 


'■Jl  N  the  primitive  mind  no  question 
ell  ever  arose  as  to  the  validity  of  its 
leading  ideas  either  in  its  crude 
science  or  its  religion.  Whether  the 
ideas  came  to  the  waking  mind  under 
the  stress  of  adverse  circumstances 
or  to  the  unconscious  mind  in  placid 
sleep,  it  made  little  difference.  They 
were  considered  true  of  objective 
reality.  That  is,  man’s  consciousness 
from  the  very  beginning  has  been 
ontological  and  it  was  only  with  a 
great  effort  that  he  could  think  away 
the  object  with  which  his  ideas  were 
intended  to  correspond.  As  soon  as 


2 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


man  grew  reflective,  however,  he  be¬ 
came  cognizant  of  the  fact  that  his  in¬ 
dividual  consciousness  was  scrappy 
and,  in  contrast  with  this,  objective 
experience  had  every  appearance  of 
being  continuous.  Immediately  the 
question  arose, — does  my  subjective 
cognitive  process  that  indicates  an 
external  object,  really  copy  that  ob¬ 
ject?  Do  I  know  reality  apart  from 
any  mind  or  is  the  cognitive  idea  only 
engaged  with  its  own  constructs? 
With  the  advent  of  such  questions 
arose  earnest  investigation  looking 
towards  the  solution  of  the  problems 
involved. 

A  man  may  be  religious  and  yet 
his  object  of  adoration  may  not  satis¬ 
fy  the  theistic  postulates,  for  religion 
does  not  demand  Theism.  For  in¬ 
stance,  the  intellectual  Brahman  was 
deeply  religious  but  the  Upanishad 
philosopher  did  not  hesitate  to  assert 


INTRODUCTION 


3 


that  he  himself  was  God;  the  Hindu’s 
soul  was  bound  up  in  religion  but  he 
believed  in  Vishnu  and  Civa;  the  an¬ 
cient  Greek  was  careful  about  his  re¬ 
ligious  rites  but  he  envisaged  many 
Gods  the  chief  of  which  was  Dyaus 
Zeus,  that  is,  the  shining  sky;  the 
Chinese  Taoist  placed  religion  above 
all,  but  his  God  was  unknowable  and 
indefinable  and  yet  he  could  be  called 
the  “Equable,”  the  “Inaudible”  and 
the  “Subtle”  but  this  further  state¬ 
ment  could  be  risked  concerning  him, 
namely,  that  all  existence  in  the  uni¬ 
verse  sprang  from  him  whose  name 
is  Tao.  The  attributes  of  fatherhood 
or  personality  or  spirituality  could 
not  be  ascribed  to  him. 

Religion  has  had  many  attempted 
definitions  but  like  “personality”  it 
has  not  yet  been  adequately  defined. 
Bernard  Bosanquet  remarks  that  “re¬ 
ligion  is  essentially  an  attitude  in 


4 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


which  the  finite  being  stands  to  what¬ 
ever  he  at  once  fears  and  approves,”1 
with  the  implication  that  this  being 
for  religion  may  be  almost  anything 
and  even  the  dog’s  attitude  toward 
his  master  may  be  regarded  as  religi¬ 
ous.2  There  is  both  an  intuitional  and 
an  intellectual  element  present  in  the 
religious  reaction  and  the  difficulty  is 
to  strike  a  proper  balance  in  refer¬ 
ence  to  them.  Max  Muller,  Spencer, 
Fichte,  Schelling,  Hegel  and  the  fol¬ 
lowers  of  the  latter  lay  too  much 
stress  upon  the  intellect  while  others 
such  as  Jacobi,  Schleiermacher,  and 
Hoffding  emphasized  the  feeling  too 
greatly.  A  full  definition  of  religion 
must  include  the  activity  of  all  man’s 
faculties  including  the  will,  the  feel¬ 
ing  and  the  intellect. 

1  Vid.  “The  Value  and  Destiny  of  the  Individual,"  p. 
235,  B.  Bosanquet. 

2  Op.  Cit.  p.  236. 


INTRODUCTION 


5 


The  religious  consciousness  could 
not  stand  long  “on  its  own  founda¬ 
tion.”  It  sought  rationalization  and 
interpretation  and  thus  we  have  the¬ 
ology.  Thought  has  been  instrumen¬ 
tal  in  lifting  religion  from  its  former 
level  so  that  now  it  can  appeal  to  the 
greatest  minds.  Thought  has  sur¬ 
rounded  the  feeling  nucleus  of  re¬ 
ligion  and  so  brightened  it  that  it  now 
shines  with  its  own  light,  but,  it  took 
ages  and  ages  to  dissipate  the  dark¬ 
ness  that  first  surrounded  it.  As  soon 
as  thought  began  to  gain  more  power, 
the  fields  of  investigation  began  to  be 
narrowed  and  theories  about  the  be¬ 
ing  of  God  came  upon  the  scene  and 
were  separated  from  the  earlier  theo¬ 
logical  ideas  which  already  assumed 
that  the  Divine  Being  existed  with 
qualities  which  could  be  easily  de¬ 
fined.  Theism  then  came  into  being. 
Just  as  psychology  assumes  the  exis- 


6 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


tence  of  space  and  time  and  the  “dual¬ 
ism  of  Object  and  Subject  and  their 
pre-established  harmony,”3  whatever 
the  psychologist’s  philosophical 
standpoint  may  be,  so  theology  as¬ 
sumes  that  the  object  of  its  theories 
has  an  existence,  but  Theism  engages 
itself  with  the  problem  as  to  whether 
or  not  the  existence  of  this  being  can 
be  supported  by  rational  arguments. 


3  “Psychology,”  Vol.  I.  p.  220,  James. 


CHAPTER  II 

The  Back-bone  of  Theism 

Theism  holds  that  there  is  a  per¬ 
sonal  cause  for  all  things  in  the  uni¬ 
verse.  “Theists  believe  in  a  personal 
Being  of  infinite  rightness  and  infi¬ 
nite  goodness  wielding  infinite  wis¬ 
dom  and  infinite  power.”4  Robert 
Flint’s  definition  is  very  similar  in¬ 
cluding  a  power  that  is  infinite  and  a 
wisdom  and  goodness  that  are  upon 
the  same  level.5  He,  however,  adds 
the  notion  of  “self -existence”  which 
may  be  properly  included  in  the  attri¬ 
bute  of  infinite  power.  Bowne  in¬ 
cluded  in  the  extended  definition  un¬ 
changeableness  and  self-equality. 


4  Vid.  “The  Knowledge  of  God,”  Gifford  Lectures, 
Vol.  1.  p.  40,  Gwatkin. 

5  Cf.  “Theism,”  p.  18,  Robert  Flint. 


8  IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 

But  there  is  little  use  in  the  multipli¬ 
cation  of  attributes.  If  the  theist  can 
establish  spirituality,  personality, 
transcendence  and  unity  as  attributes 
of  the  Divine  Being-,  he  may  congra¬ 
tulate  himself.  But  the  human  mind 
is  never  satisfied  and  the  tendency  is 
always  to  overdo  the  matter  especial¬ 
ly  in  the  philosophical  field. 

1.  The  Divine  Being  is  Spiritual.  It 

is  not  our  intention  just  here  to  go  in¬ 
to  a  full  discussion  of  Materialism  or 
Naturalism  but  simply  to  refer  to  it 
as  it  bears  upon  the  leading  ideas  of 
Theism.  One  is  a  materialist  if  he 
has  the  habit  of  “explaining  higher 
phenomena  by  lower  ones,  and  leav¬ 
ing  the  destinies  of  the  world  at  the 
mercy  of  its  blinder  parts  and 
forces.”6  For  Materialism,  the  laws 


6  Vid.  “Pragmatism,”  p.  93,  William  James. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


9 


of  nature,  as  partially  recorded  in  the 
human  mind,  run  the  universe  and  all 
phenomena  are  guided  by  these  blind 
laws.  For  Spiritualism,  mind  stands 
uppermost  and  so  important  is  it  that 
it  is  regarded  as  the  essential  agent 
that  operates  the  universe.  There  is 
so  much  difference  between  the  two 
standpoints  that  the  waving  of  the 
Jamesian  pragmatistic  wand  is  not 
sufficient  to  make  it  merely  a  “conflict 
between  aesthetic  preferences.”7  The 
Spencerian  process  of  matter  refine¬ 
ment  only  succeeds  in  showing  that 
there  is  a  principle  superior  to  matter 
and  Haechel’s  “Riddle  of  the  Uni¬ 
verse”  finds  its  best  solution  in  that 
which  he  tried  in  vain  to  escape  as  an 
essential  principle,  namely  Spirit. 

James  agrees  with  Bowne,  Ladd 
and  many  others,  that  the  deepest 


7  Ibid.  p.  94,  98. 


10 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


need  of  the  human  soul  is  that  there 
should  be  an  eternal  moral  order  of 
the  world,  but  Materialism  or  Nat¬ 
uralism  denies  the  existence  of  this 
order.  Thus,  there  is  a  great  differ¬ 
ence  between  the  two,  both  in  refer¬ 
ence  to  the  past  and  future.  The 
time  element  here,  seems  to  have  con¬ 
fused  the  late  Harvard  philosopher. 
What  the  Divine  has  done  in  the  past 
is  at  least  some  indication  of  what  He 
will  do  in  the  future  for  past  and  pres¬ 
ent,  which  are  words  of  distinctly  hu¬ 
man  import,  may  be  also  moments  in 
the  “present”  time-span  of  God.  Ma¬ 
terialism  would  have  the  world- 
events  of  the  past  guided  by  a  blind 
principle  which  only  gains  progress 
by  chance  and  the  future  of  the  world 
to  display  a  similar  character  until 
the  tragic  end  comes  in  the  destruc¬ 
tion  of  all  things  including  the  mind 
and  all  its  ideals.  Theism  or  Spirit- 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


11 


ualism  represents  a  Divine  Being-  al¬ 
ways  intelligent  and  not  merely  be¬ 
coming  intelligent  in  man  and,  thus, 
always  guiding  the  world  according 
to  the  idea  of  the  good.  In  the  past, 
this  guidance,  so  evident  in  history, 
has  been  freely  given  and  in  the 
future,  man  has  every  reason  to  be¬ 
lieve,  it  will  continue,  assuring  him 
that  his  ideals,  which  indeed  have 
their  place  somewhere  in  the  divine 
order,  will  be  preserved  and  made 
to  prevail. 

That  the  Divine  Being  is  Spiritual 
is  the  result  of  a  long  agony  of 
thought  reinforced  by  Divine  enlight¬ 
enment.  To  reduce  Him  to  anything 
less  would  be  the  belittling  of  man 
himself  who,  in  his  rational  moments, 
is  constantly  shedding  forth  the  God- 
given  light  that  is  within  him.  Cer¬ 
tainly,  his  interpretation  will  always 
be  inadequate  but  he  is  bound  to  put 


12 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


in  the  forefront  what  he  considers  the 
most  valuable  “when  his  life  is  full¬ 
est  and  his  soul  at  its  highest  stretch.” 

Almost  every  system  of  philoso¬ 
phy  acknowledges  the  spiritual  basis 
of  nature.  One  would  think  in  read¬ 
ing  the  realistic  literature  of  the  day 
that  Realism  also  acknowledged  this. 
Thus,  Professor  Edwin  B.  Holt  re¬ 
marks:  “To  Professor  Royce ...  I  owe 
my  notions  of  the  conceptual  nature 
of  the  universe.”8  “Mathematical  and 
logical  concepts  are  made  out  of  “con¬ 
cept-stuff.”9  Now  “concept-stuff,”  or 
neutral  material  out  of  which  “con¬ 
cepts”  can  be  made  is  so  “infinitely 
and  incredibly  refined”10  that  it  is 
nothing  short  of  spiritual.  To  have 

8  Cf.  “The  Concept  of  Consciousness,”  p.  xiii,  Edwin 
Holt. 

9  Op.  Cit.  p.  136, 

10  “Pragmatism,”  p.  95,  William  James.  Here  James 
uses  this  expression  in  reference  to  Mr.  Spencer’s  atti¬ 
tude  towards  matter. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


13 


that  spiritual  stuff  floating-  around 
without  an  adequate  mind  to  produce 
or  even  receive  it  and  to  have  that 
precious  material  wasted  except 
when  it  comes  in  contact,  under  right 
conditions  with  a  human  organism,  is 
both  incredible  and  intolerable. 

Professor  Spaulding  of  Princeton 
regards  the  universe  as  consisting  of 
three  kinds  of  facts,  physical,  con¬ 
ceptual  and  ideal.  The  physical 
world  exists  of  its  own  right  consist¬ 
ing  of  physical  facts  that  may  illu¬ 
minate  a  human  organism  and  may 
not.  The  conceptual  world  consists 
of  mathematical  and  logical  concepts 
and  the  ideal  world  is  the  realm  of 
aesthetic  and  moral  entities  such  as 
beauty  and  justice.  Thus,  the  mys¬ 
tic’s  world  is  conceded  to  be  as  real 
as  the  world  of  symmetrical  and 
asymmetrical  relations  but  hardly  of 
as  much  value.  Thus,  we  have  three 


14 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


different  kinds  of  irreducible  facts  in 
the  universe.  Each  can  be  brought 
into  relation  with  the  other  without 
one  being  dependent  upon  the  other. 

Alexander,  the  English  realist  in 
his  “Presidential  Addresses  before 
the  Aristotelian  Society,”  described 
perceptions  as  “non-mental  realities.” 
Perceptions,  according  to  this,  have 
an  existence  of  their  own  just  as  con¬ 
cepts  subsist  before  anyone  mentally 
grasps  them.  Perry  refers  to  the 
“mind  without  and  the  mind  within.” 
Thus,  it  appears  as  if  Realism  con¬ 
cludes  that  the  world  is  partly  physi¬ 
cal  and  partly  spiritual. 

The  human  mind,  at  its  highest 
reach,  is  not  satisfied  with  a  division 
within  the  heart  of  reality.  It  seeks 
unity;  it  seeks  oneness  but  that  unity 
need  not  be  an  absolute  unity  that 
destroys  freedom  and  that  unity  can 
only  be  the  outcome  of  the  activity 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


15 


of  a  spiritual  world-ground.  The 
fact  that  all  superior  minds  have  fin¬ 
ally  rejected  materialistic  Monism 
and  piece-meal  Idealism  shows  that 
neither  of  these  can  satisfy  man’s 
life.  We  are,  thus,  driven  by  a  certain 
thought  and  will  compulsion  to  some 
form  of  Idealism.  The  mighty  power 
in  the  world  that  we  call  religion  de¬ 
mands  a  Supreme  Spiritual  Being 
called  God,  our  moral  nature  de¬ 
mands  that  he  be  moral  and  our 
rational  nature  demands  that  he  be 
rational.  Man  will  not  finally  accept 
three  different  orders.  In  his  demand 
for  unity  he  conceives  them  as  one — 
the  spiritual  basis  of  the  universe. 
“Doubt  him  (God)  and  you  shake  the 
objective  value  of  your  own  cog¬ 
nition.”11 


11  Vid.  “A  Philosophical  System  of  Theistic  Idealism,” 
p.  75,  Lindsay. 


16 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


2.  The  Divine  Being  is  Personal. 

Since  modern  men  have  begun  to 
notice  the  lack  of  literature  on  per¬ 
sonality  and  to  feel  how  important 
this  conception  is  for  philosophical 
and  theological  thought,  some  of  the 
most  acute  among  them  are  attempt¬ 
ing  to  write  in  order  on  a  subject  that 
has  long  needed  rational  treatment. 
If  men  have  no  definition  of  person¬ 
ality,  they  say  there  is  little  sense  in 
applying  it  to  the  Divine  Being.  In 
their  efforts  to  define  it,  some  have 
moved  along  psychological  lines, 
others  have  taken  a  purely  specula¬ 
tive  view,  and  still  others  have  given 
up  the  attempt  to  understand  or  de¬ 
fine  it  and  have  placed  it  on  the  shelf 
together  with  other  terms  labelled 
with  the  words  sui  generis.  This 
label  clearly  signifies  that  there  is  a 
tendency  to  give  up  the  attempt  at 
definition.  It  might  be  worth  while 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


17 


to  add  that  many  objects  are  even 
now  in  process  of  definition.  Man 
has  not  been  shot  upon  the  scene  per¬ 
fectly  rational.  God’s  plan  has  been 
by  the  slow  path  of  development.  It 
has  only  been  within  the  last  forty 
years  that  the  mathematical  defini¬ 
tion  of  infinite  numbers  has  been  dis¬ 
covered  and  this  was  done  by  Georg 
Cantor  shortly  before  1882.  The  defi¬ 
nition  of  number  itself  was  dis¬ 
covered  or  constructed  about  the 
same  time  by  Gottlob  Frege  of  Jena. 
The  problem  of  the  numerical  infinite 
had  proved  itself  puzzling  from  the 
time  of  Zeno  and  infinite  numbers 
were  thought  to  be  self -contradictory 
until  modern  light  was  thrown  upon 
the  problem.  To  this  day,  James, 
Bergson,  and  certain  other  philoso¬ 
phers,  impelled  by  the  doctrine  that 
all  analysis  is  falsification,  teach  that 
motion  escapes  definition  altogether 


18 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


and  must  be  felt,  whenever  it  is  taken 
account  of  at  all.  On  the  other  hand, 
Bertrand  Russell  and  his  realistic  col¬ 
leagues  accept  the  heroic  theory  of 
the  “conception  of  instants  without 
duration.”12  Now  suppose  one  came 
forward  with  the  idea  that  there  was 
no  motion  because  it  could  not  be  de¬ 
fined  or  because  the  mind  could  not 
give  any  but  a  heroic  definition  of  it. 
The  disproof  of  the  statement  would 
be  evident  in  the  movement  of  the 
tongue  of  the  speaker  himself  and 
the  auditor  could  disprove  it  by  mere¬ 
ly  lifting  his  arm,  rising  from  his  seat 
or  winking  his  eye.  Nothing  is  more 
evident  than  movement  and  nothing 
is  harder  of  definition.  Royce  has 
shown  how  difficult  it  is  to  define  an 
individual  and  how  still  more  difficult 


12  Vid.  “Scientific  Method  in  Philosophy,”  p.  151,  Ber¬ 
trand  Russell. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM  19 

it  is  to  discover  one  with  the  senses, 
yet  without  an  individual  there  could 
never  be  a  class  and  without  a  class 
of  individuals  there  could  never  be 
such  a  logical  entity  as  a  relation. 
Thus,  the  conclusion  is,  there  must  be 
individuals  and  if  they  are  not  found 
sensibly  they  must  be  assumed  or  the 
mind  would  have  to  give  up  entirely 
its  orderly  work. 

Although  personality  is  still  in  the 
hands  of  the  definers  and  much  brain 
energy  is  being  expended  upon  it  and 
the  sense  data  that  indicate  its  pres¬ 
ence  are  very  meagre,  yet  self-con¬ 
sciousness  and  orderly  self-determin¬ 
ation  are  acknowledged  to  be  in¬ 
cluded  in  its  definition.  The  first  pre¬ 
supposes  intellect  and  the  second  will, 
for  as  Royce  suggests,  the  self  has  a 
“past”13  and  is  oppressed  with  num- 


13  “The  Problem  of  Christianity,”  Vol.  II,  p.  40. 


20 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


erous  “needs.”  That  is,  a  “finite 
personality  is  a  will  to  do  something1.” 
Chaotic  activity  by  no  means  sug¬ 
gests  a  person  as  in  the  case  of  the 
thunder-clap  or  the  wind  roaring  on 
the  ocean.  It  must  be  orderly  and 
suggestive  of  design.  Certainly,  there 
are  ideal  enlargements  of  personality 
and  many  of  the  writers  of  the  past 
such  as  Augustine,  Anselm  and 
Thomas  Aquinas  and  of  the  present 
such  as  Schlossmann,  Harnack,  Gier¬ 
ke,  Trendelenburg,  Max  Muller  and 
Paul  Carus  have  not  hesitated  to  in¬ 
clude  other  qualities  in  the  concep¬ 
tion,  but  self-consciousness  and  self- 
determination  cannot  be  omitted 
from  the  definition.  We  can,  thus, 
recognize  the  nature  of  personality 
and  have  some  notion  of  what  we 
mean  when  we  refer  to  it.  The  lack 
of  a  definition  fully  adequate  should 
not  deter  us  from  referring  it  to  man 
and,  for  greater  reasons,  to  God. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


21 


(i)  Personality  in  Man. 

The  argument  for  the  person¬ 
ality  of  God  is  closely  related  to  the 
argument  for  the  personality  of  man. 
If  man  is  not  known  to  be  a  person  it 
is  still  harder  to  know  what  person¬ 
ality  is  and  more  difficult  to  apply  it 
to  God. 

Kant  was  empiricist  enough  to 
hold  that  there  could  be  no  fruitful 
conception  of  the  ego  any  more  than 
of  God  because  it  is  impossible  to 
schematize  either  one  or  the  other. 
If  we  could  conjure  up  God  or  the  ego 
in  pure  intuition,  definition  would  be 
possible,  but  not  otherwise.  You 
cannot  know  God,  he  thought,  be¬ 
cause  the  mind  is  too  narrow  to  grasp 
the  whole  of  all  existence  and  there 
can  be  no  “intuition”  or  experience 
connected  with  this  conception. 
Again,  the  soul  or  ego  cannot  be 
known  because  it  is  impossible  for  it 


22 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


to  be  the  object  of  itself  and  in  seek¬ 
ing1  to  grasp  it  we  keep  constantly 
turning  around  it  but  never  succeed 
in  reaching  it.  The  ego  cannot  know 
itself  by  means  of  the  categories.  It 
is  only  the  condition  of  the  possibility 
of  experience  and  we  cannot  properly 
say  that  it  is  a  substance,  for  all  sub¬ 
stances  are  determined  in  relation  to 
it. 

The  main  objection  Kant  had  to 
Rational  Psychology  was  stated  by 
him  thus:  “The  assumed  predicates  of 
the  soul — even  if  they  should  be  sup¬ 
posed  to  be  its  real  properties — con¬ 
stitute  an  idea  which  could  not  possi¬ 
bly  be  presented  in  the  concrete.”14 
The  x  of  experience  he  thought  nec¬ 
essary,  if  the  self  was  to  be  known  as 
an  object  and  any  synthetic  .judg- 


14  The  “Prolegomena”  describes  it  as  “something  to 
which  all  thinking  stands  in  relation.” 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


23 


ments  made  concerning-  it.  Thus,  he 
concluded  that  no  one  knew  anything 
about  the  properties  of  the  soul.  It 
was  regarded  as  merely  a  “regula¬ 
tive  idea”  which  may  be  useful  in  psy¬ 
chological  investigation,  but  the  in¬ 
vestigator  was  never  to  forget  that 
he  was  dealing  with  an  idea  and  not 
a  concrete  thing.  Because  of  the 
absence  of  intuition  here  the  only 
judgments  that  could  be  made  con¬ 
cerning  it  were  analytic. 

But  why,  we  ask,  should  not  the 
judgments  concerning  self-con¬ 
sciousness  or  the  soul  be  synthetic  as 
well  as  others?  On  the  Kantian  hy¬ 
pothesis,  of  course,  they  could  not  be, 
but  the  modern  mind  has  given  up 
the  demand  for  schematization  in  the 
Kantian  sense  and,  in  the  absence  of 
this  demand,  we  can  look  more  hope¬ 
fully  upon  the  whole  situation.  Kant 
thought  that  we  could  be  sure  of  our 


24 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


mathematical  knowledge  but  there  is 
something  far  more  concrete  in  the 
feeling  of  the  self  than  in  mathema¬ 
tics  and  in  fact  mathematics  itself 
presupposes  the  self  that  is  thinking 
it. 

Kant  is  certainly  inconsistent 
here,  for  he  reduces  the  self  to  a  bare 
consciousness  of  unity,  or  feeling  of 
existence  accompanying  all  human 
ideas,  and  yet  presupposes  that  it  or¬ 
iginates  an  idea  which  is  really  a 
good  deal  more  than  the  thought  of 
unity,  for  it  is  the  actual  idea  of  a  self 
used,  however,  as  a  regulative  prin¬ 
ciple.  Again,  if  the  “self”  carries 
with  it  the  machinery  of  the  categor¬ 
ies  which  is  always  at  work  whenever 
we  think,  in  the  working  of  these  cat¬ 
egories  we  have  a  vast  knowledge  of 
the  self,  that  is  we  know  how  the  self 
works  in  gaining  knowledge  but  this 
of  course,  gives  us  no  inkling  of  its 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


25 


freedom  or  immortality  but  neverthe- 
less  gives  us  knowledge  of  it. 

Any  one  can  see  that  Kant’s  diffi¬ 
culty  was  the  presence  of  his  mechan¬ 
ical  empiricism.  He  found  it  impos¬ 
sible  to  break  away  from  Hume.  The 
pure  intuition  ever  harassed  him  as 
the  ghost  of  the  Humian  empiricism. 
This  was  constantly  appearing  and 
claiming  recognition.  This  is  evi¬ 
dent  in  his  disparagement  of  psycho¬ 
logy  when  he  tries  to  show  that  in  the 
continual  flux  of  the  inner  life  the 
parts  could  not  be  separated  and  put 
together  again  and,  even  under  ob¬ 
servation  he  pointed  out,  the  object 
was  transfigured  to  such  an  extent 
that  its  nature  entirely  disappeared 
in  the  process.  He,  thus,  concluded 
that  psychology  was  merely  a  system¬ 
atic  historical  summation  of  facts  not 
worthy  of  the  name  of  science.  But 
the  thoughful  student  cannot  help  ob- 


26 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


serving-  that  even  in  the  phenomenal 
world,  there  is  no  absolute  isolation 
of  parts.  Ernst  Mack  has  made  this 
clear  by  showing  that  all  facts  are  al¬ 
ready  in  a  matrix  of  relations  and  it 
is  only  by  conceptual  abstraction  that 
one  part  can  be  separated  from  an¬ 
other  and,  if  this  conceptual  manipu¬ 
lation  is  allowable  in  respect  of  exter¬ 
nal  nature  which  exhibits  no  example 
of  isolation  and  unity  of  parts,  why 
should  it  not  be  in  reference  to  the 
human  self? 

Kant’s  eye  is  full  upon  “experi¬ 
ence”  and  thinking  that  the  laws  of 
phenomena  had  proper  application 
only  to  external  phenomena,  he  was 
led  to  reject  psychology  on  the  one 
hand  and  all  theories  concerning  God 
on  the  other.  It  is  true  that  no  ma¬ 
thematical  figure  can  be  made  either 
of  the  finite  or  the  infinite  self.  Their 
natures  refuse  to  be  measured  or  cal- 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


27 


culated  by  homogeneous  units.  One 
cannot  use  here  the  mechanical  and 
mathematical  language  so  necessary 
in  the  exact  sciences.  But  this  does 
not  exclude  synthesis  and  leave  the 
eager  investigator  on  the  level  of 
bare  analysis.  Synthesis  in  mathema¬ 
tics  is  attained  when  one  judgment 
is  seen  to  imply  another.  This  is 
done  without  the  empirical  back¬ 
ground.  In  other  fields  knowledge  is 
also  possible  after  the  same  manner, 
for  man’s  intelligence  is  indeed  an  in¬ 
strument  of  synthesis.  If  mathema¬ 
tics  is  the  free  creation  of  the  human 
spirit  as  some  hold,  and  exact  knowl¬ 
edge  is  attained  there  without  ques¬ 
tion,  why  should  the  human  spirit  be 
impotent  to  define  its  own  nature? 
And  why  should  it  be  impotent  in  the 
presence  of  God?  If  space,  the  chosen 
groundwork  for  the  configurations  of 
geometry,  is  merely  a  conception,  as 


28 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


moderns  would  have  it,  and  if  intelli¬ 
gence  has  created  it  upon  the  basis  of 
which  vast  knowledge  of  an  exact  and 
absolute  character  has  been  attained 
so  useful  in  our  every  day  life,  is 
it  at  all  likely  that  it  fails  entirely  to 
form,  an  adequate  and  exact  concep¬ 
tion  of  the  human  self? 

It  might  be  allowable  just  here  to 
refer  to  some  other  views  of  the  self. 
John  Locke  believed  in  a  metaphys¬ 
ical  something  within  man  and  also 
within  physical  nature  but  confessed 
that  “we  have  no  clear  ideas”13  of 
them.  Berkeley  judged  that  “mater¬ 
ial  substance”16  had  no  meaning  apart 
from  unified  sensations  and  Hume  as¬ 
serted,  without  any  reserve,  that  we 
have  no  idea  whatever  of  a  substance 


15  Vid .  “Essay  Concerning  the  Human  Understanding/’ 
Book  1.  Ch.  IV.  18. 

16  Vid.  “Principles  of  the  Human  Understanding,”  pt. 
1,  Sec.  17,  20. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


29 


distinct  from  that  of  a  collection  of 
particular  qualities.17  Bain  agreed 
that  there  was  no  such  thing  as  a  self. 
On  this  basis,  some  recommend  that 
instead  of  saying,  “I  think,”  one 
should  say,  “it  is  thinking”  or  “think¬ 
ing  is  taking  place”  just  as  one  would 
remark  on  a  rainy  day,  “it  is  raining.” 

Professor  James  had  no  hesitation 
in  adopting  a  similar  view  for  he 
shows,  to  his  own  satisfaction  at  least, 
that  “climate”  is  not  an  entity  behind 
a  series  of  days  but  is  merely  a  name 
for  the  qualified  series  itself,  and 
wealth  is  no  virtue  pertaining  to  a 
wealthy  man  but  is  a  comprehensive 
name  for  his  lands  and  houses  and 
bank  account.  His  thought  here  leads 
to  the  further  pragmatistic  notion 
that  “truth”  is  something  of  the  same 
order  and  refers  to  certain  successful 


17  Cf,  “Treatise  on  Human  Nature,”  Part  1,  Section  6. 


30 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


happenings  in  human  life.  “Behind 
(the)  fact  there  is  nothing,”  says 
William  James,  in  thorough  agree¬ 
ment  with  David  Hume;  all  we  have 
is  a  series  of  coherent  conscious  facts. 

Professor  James  is  also  in  accord 
with  John  Stuart  Mill  in  this  way  of 
regarding  the  conscious  facts  of  hu¬ 
man  life.  Ideas  hang  together,  he 
used  to  say,  “next  to  next”  as  meshes 
in  a  net  and  the  ordinary  ego  as  well 
as  the  transcendental  ego  are  ruled 
out.  But  the  strung-along  series  of 
ideas,  floating  upon  nothing  that  can 
be  known,  has  the  power  of  being 
self-conscious.  That  is,  the  series  can 
be  conscious  of  itself.  But  many 
have  seen  the  difficulty  here  and  have 
asked  how  a  series  of  ideas  could  be 
conscious  of  itself  and  how  there 
could  be  coherent  ideas  at  all  without 
a  thinker.  This  is  the  “idiotic”  spot 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


31 


in  the  philosophy  of  both  Mill  and 
James. 

There  is  a  certain  intuition  present 
in  the  apprehension  of  the  self.  We 
cannot  seem  to  get  away  from  this 
intuition  in  our  waking  moments. 
The  ego  as  defined,  is  not  presented 
to  the  senses  for  in  describing  its 
characteristics,  it  is  seen  that  the 
mind  has  already  been  at  work  upon 
it.  Again,  unity  and  identity  are  not 
necessarily  involved  in  the  ego  (for 
all  necessity  is  logical  in  its  nature), 
unless  the  ego  be  first  consciously  or 
unconsciously  regarded  as  containing 
them.  The  intuition  of  the  self  is 
merely  a  flash;  it  is  almost  vacuous, 
but  it  is  the  only  basis  of  experience 
that  we  have  to  work  with.  It  is  far 
more  defective  than  a  concept  could 
be.  But  w'e  begin  at  once  to  define  it 
and  if  we  “don’t  understand  we  define 


32 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


our  definition.”  Thus  we  gain  an  in¬ 
terpretation  of  the  self  or  personality. 

We  acknowledge  that  the  world 
owes  a  debt  of  gratitude  to  Hume, 
James  and  their  followers  for  having 
called  its  attention  to  happenings  and 
activities  and  away  from  “substance,” 
but  the  pendulum  that  had  swung  so 
far  in  the  rationalistic  direction  has, 
in  the  case  of  these  men,  swung  so  far 
in  the  opposite  direction  that  we  have 
lost  sight  not  only  of  active  centres  of 
consciousness  but  also  of  knowledge 
of  the  external  world.  On  the  basis 
of  their  philosophy,  nothing  but  judg¬ 
ments  of  perception  are  possible. 
Organized  knowledge  cannot  be 
reached  and  even  the  laws  of  external 
nature  hang  in  the  air.  Mathematics 
is  considered  an  experimental  science 
and  we  are  supposed  to  have  gained 
our  ideas  of  space  from  “tangible 
points”  arranged  in  a  certain  order. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


33 


Space,  time  and  all  the  categories 
came  from  experience.  It  was  this 
conclusion — the  natural  outcome  of 
radical  empiricism, — that  aroused 
Kant  from  his  dogmatic  slumbers  and 
caused  him  to  take  his  stand,  as  a  true 
champion,  on  the  side  of  the  natural 
sciences.  He  would  save  science  from 
utter  ruin  by  rescuing  it  from  the 
outer  world.  His  Aesthetic  was,  thus, 
an  earnest  effort  to  save  mathematics 
and  the  Analytic  to  rescue  natural 
science.  But  he  rescued  them  by 
sweeping  them  all  into  the  mind,  be¬ 
lieving  that  if  he  could  show  that  the 
fundamental  laws  of  science  be¬ 
longed  to  the  very  structure  of  the 
mind  itself,  he  could  insure  them 
against  all  the  darts  of  the  evil  one. 
But  being  concerned  mainly  with  the 
natural  sciences  and  not  being  able 
to  entirely  throw  off  the  grip  of  em¬ 
piricism,  his  philosophy  did  not  sue- 


34 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


ceed  in  establishing  the  possibility  of 
the  knowledge  of  the  self.  Thus,  he 
concluded  that  there  was  no  knowl¬ 
edge  of  the  self  because  it  refused 
schematization  or  the  possibility  of 
intuition  (Anschauung).  In  respect 
of  knowledge  of  the  ego  then,  Kant 
makes  little  advancement  beyond  the 
empiricists  that  preceded  him. 

The  revival  of  the  Humian  philo¬ 
sophy  in  modern  days  with  its  dis¬ 
paragement  of  science  and  its  fun¬ 
damental  repudiation  of  all  metaphy¬ 
sical  knowledge  has  also  brought 
forth  a  reaction  similar  to  the  Kant¬ 
ian.  The  only  difference  is,  this  re¬ 
action  has  exhibited  a  firmer  faith  in 
the  intellect.  It  is  not  satisfied  with 
bare  criticism.  It  demands  something 
positive  and  the  intellect  is  looked  up 
to  as  the  chief  instrument  of  this  pos¬ 
itiveness.  Certainly,  feeling  and  will 
are  not  repudiated  but  once  more  we 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


35 


have  hopefully  climbed  into  the  Greek 
atmosphere  of  faith  in  the  human 
reason.  Thus,  we  conclude  that  to 
deny  personality  to  man  is  against 
experience,  absolutely  intolerable 
and  wholly  unreasonable. 

Self-consciousness  and  self-con¬ 
trol  are  the  fundamental  elements  of 
human  personality,  and  the  latter 
means  that  the  self  has  the  power  of 
origination  and  direction  according 
to  law.  Kant  had  stated  that  an  un¬ 
caused  event  was  inconceivable  but 
this  is  acknowledged  to  be  an  exces¬ 
sive  statement  due  to  his  general  at¬ 
titude  toward  science  and  his  view 
that  causality  was  a  primal  law  of  the 
human  mind. 

If  the  difference  between  the  con¬ 
cept  of  causality  as  applied  to  a  centre 
of  consciousness  and  the  concept  as 
applied  to  physical  nature  had  always 
been  kept  in  mind,  much  of  the  men- 


36 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


tal  energy  wasted  on  the  subject 
might  have  been  spared.  The  ob¬ 
jective  attitude  is  always  the  best  and 
is  always  taken  when  dealing  with 
the  science  of  the  external  world,  and 
such  a  writer  as  Hobbes  makes  the 
law  of  uniformity  all  inclusive  so  that 
all  ideas  take  their  places  in  the 
stream  of  causal  events,  excluding 
the  personal  equation  in  each  case, 
each  idea  being  caused  by  some  other 
in  a  sequential  line  and  so  on  ad  infini 
turn .  But  such  a  moderate  man  as 
Helmholtz  referred  to  this  law  as  a 
“presupposition”  and  Bertrand  Rus¬ 
sell  remarks  concerning  the  theory  of 
continuity  that,  “there  can  never  be 
any  empirical  evidence  to  demon¬ 
strate  that  the  sensible  world  is  con¬ 
tinuous  . .  The  continuity  of  space  and 
time,  the  infinite  number  of  different 
shades  in  the  spectrum . .  are  all  in  the 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


37 


nature  of  unverifiable  hypothesis.”18 
Again,  he  remarks:  “The  strict,  cer¬ 
tain,  universal  law  of  causation  which 
philosophers  advocate  is  an  ideal,  pos¬ 
sibly  true,  but  not  known  to  be  true 
by  any  available  evidence.”19  It  is 
really  something  that  the  mind,  tak¬ 
ing  its  cue  from  the  consciousness  of 
its  own  initiative,  persistently  thrusts 
into  the  face  of  reality  but  is  not  ex- 
perientially  supported  when  the  mind 
absolutely  asserts  that  it  is  universal. 

In  dealing  with  the  self,  as  we  have 
seen,  another  meaning  is  given  to  the 
concept  of  causation.  It  is  not  here 
merely  phenomena  conforming  to 
law.  It  includes  teleological  categor¬ 
ies  and  the  origination  and  expendi¬ 
ture  of  spiritual  energy.  The  objec- 

18  Vid.  “Scientific  Method  in  Philosophy,”  1914  p.  148, 
149. 

is  Ibid.  p.  226. 


38 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


tive  and  mechanical  view-point  is 
very  useful  for  scientific  and  natural- 
istic  purposes  but  one  should  see 
that  the  mind  that  originated  the  ob¬ 
jective  viewpoint  in  respect  of  the 
physical  world,  can  take  another  at¬ 
titude  when  dealing  with  itself.  Cau¬ 
sation  in  the  spiritual  world  is  actual¬ 
ly  primal  in  time  and  man  would 
never  have  applied  it  to  the  physical 
world  if  he  had  not  first  recognized  it 
within  himself.  As  it  is,  the  concep¬ 
tion  in  its  fullness  and  richness  is 
withheld  from  the  external  world 
and,  except  in  the  case  of  primitive 
man  and  the  unsophisticated  among 
us,  an  idea  altogether  truncated  is  ap¬ 
plied  to  it.  The  ideas  of  efficiency, 
spontaneity  and  purpose  are  closely 
related  to  the  primitive  idea  as  be¬ 
longing  to  the  self  but  as  applied  to 
the  outside  world,  these  ideas  are  ab¬ 
stracted.  When  we  look  back  upon 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


39 


the  course  of  history  our  idea  is  not 
of  a  mechanical  line  of  causal  events 
written  on  paper  as  Hobbes  would 
have  it,  but  of  an  account  of  new  be¬ 
ginnings.  Only  the  mind  debauched 
with  scientific  learning  will  apply  the 
mechanical  concept  to  this  entire  pro¬ 
cess.  Certainly,  many  volitions  are 
subject  to  causes  but  there  is  no  proof 
that  all  of  them  are.  Some  of  them 
may,  as  Bergson  taught,  be  genuine 
novelties  in  the  world.  In  fact  our 
inevitable  conception  of  a  self  in¬ 
cludes  at  least  some  ideas  of  origina¬ 
tion  and  design.  We  refuse  to  believe 
that  freedom  is  only  a  name  for  our 
ignorance  of  the  future  and  lack  of 
memory  of  the  past.  We  refuse  to 
be  mere  pawns  upon  the  chess-board 
of  life.  And  this  volition  is  based 
upon  an  “owned”  experience  of  inter¬ 
nal  determinations.  These  experi¬ 
ences  so  possess  us  that  they  lead  to 


40  IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 

the  inevitable  interpretation  that 
there  is  an  agent  present  possessing 
the  power  of  self-determination. 

(ii)  Personality  in  God. 

It  is,  as  all  will  acknowledge,  pos¬ 
sible  to  conceive  a  religion  without 
belief  in  a  personal  God  for,  indeed, 
such  religions  have  existed  and  do 
exist.  Leuba  defines  religion  as  a 
“belief  in  a  great  and  superior  psy¬ 
chic  power — whether  personal  or 
not.”20  But  this  definition  is  so  wide 
and  so  vacuous  that  it  is  of  little  value 
to  us.  When,  however,  we  consider 
the  possible  attributes  of  a  Being  that 
will  fully  satisfy  the  modern  soul,  we 
cannot  stop  short  of  personality.  It 
isn’t  true  in  general  that  upon  reach- 
in  maturity  we  find  ourselves  “be- 


20  Vid.  ‘‘The  Psychological  Origin  and  the  Nature  of 
Religion,”  in  the  Religions  Ancient  and  Modern  series,  p. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


41 


reft”  of  “personal  divinities”21  that 
have  been  so  helpful  to  us  in  the  long 
stages  of  spiritual  development.  It 
is  also  far  from  accurate  that  man  in 
general  is  seeking  “an  impersonal  ef¬ 
ficient  substitute.”  The  statement  is 
too  sweeping.  Man  is  not  seeking, 
and  never  has  seriously  sought,  an 
“impersonal  substitute”  for  Deity. 
It  has  always  been  unnatural  for  him 
to  do  this.  Even  when  he  has  become 
pantheistic  in  his  belief,  he  has  de¬ 
fined  the  nature  of  his  own  finite  self 
as  a  will  to  fulfill  itself  or  a  yearning 
or  a  dissatisfaction  and  one  of  the  ob¬ 
jects  of  his  yearning  search  was  to 
discover,  if  possible,  a  being  who  pos¬ 
sessed  something  akin  to  his  own 
most  precious  possession,  namely  per¬ 
sonality.  The  tendency  is  always  to 
interpret  the  world  after  the  model  of 


21  Ibid.  p.  94. 


42 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


the  very  highest  it  contains.  Cer¬ 
tainly,  it  may  be  conceded  that  an  ob¬ 
ject  that  appears  at  first  altogether 
strange  will,  according  to  the  law  of 
psychological  development  after  long 
and  habitual  consideration  and  use  in 
a  certain  manner,  finally  demand  a 
belief  entirely  of  a  dominating  char¬ 
acter.  Thus,  the  unsophisticated 
mind  can  be  trained  to  function  in  a 
particular  groove  if  vital  interests 
and  circumstances  lead  it  in  this 
direction  long  enough.  Again,  the 
personal  equation  on  the  part  of  cer¬ 
tain  individuals  and  circumstantial 
trend  on  the  part  of  some  races  have 
been  instrumental  in  bringing  about 
a  train  of  thought  that  has  eventuat¬ 
ed  in  Pantheism.  But  this  standpoint 
is  not  natural  or  ultimate.  Man’s  na¬ 
tural  desire  is  not  to  be  overwhelmed 
in  a  vast  sea  of  being.  When  the 
trend  of  his  entire  nature  is  consulted 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


43 


it  will  be  seen  that  his  deepest  long¬ 
ing-  is  for  ultimate  safety  and  preser¬ 
vation  as  a  personal  entity,  and  the 
being  that  he  is  willing  to  worship  is 
one  akin  to  himself  but  vastly  super¬ 
ior  and  this  being  will,  thus,  possess 
personality.  No  deity  could  hold  the 
respect  of  the  developed  conscious¬ 
ness  and  satisfy  the  rational  will  that 
was  conceived  to  possess  a  nature  of 
less  ethical  importance  than  that  of 
the  would-be  worshipper.  If,  then,  we 
are  sure  that  there  is  such  a  thing  as 
human  personality,  it  cannot  be  re¬ 
fused  to  the  Deity. 

Can  the  personality  of  God  be  sup¬ 
ported  by  adequate  reasons?  Is  per¬ 
sonality,  as  applied  to  the  Deity, 
merely  an  impulse  of  faith  with  no 
reason  behind  it  or  is  it  the  outcome 
of  deliberate  rational  insight?  The 
latter  appears  to  have  much  truth  in 
it  although  many  have  said  that  it 


44 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


could  nofc receive  the  support  of  phil¬ 
osophy. 

When  those  who  framed  the  Ni- 
cene  Creed  in  325  and  modified  it  in 
the  Nicaeno  -  Constantinopolitan 
Creed  of  381  wrote,  “We  believe  in 
one  God”  although  they  might  not 
have  had  a  very  clear  conception  of 
personality,  they  meant  to  refer  to 
God  whatever  ethical  attributes  were 
in  man  lifted  to  their  highest  terms. 
The  great  question  of  tri-personality 
in  the  face  of  Monarchianism  and 
Sabellianism  was  the  outstanding 
problem  for  the  fathers  but  no  ques¬ 
tion  existed  in  their  minds  as  to  the 
total  personality  of  the  Deity.  The 
treatment  of  the  personality  of  God 
in  general  has  been  left  to  modern 
defenders  of  the  faith  against  Pan¬ 
theism.  The  question  of  general 
personality  seemed  to  be  so  rational 
to  Augustine  in  his  City  of  God  and 
to  Athanasius  in  his  writings  that 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


45 


they  never  call  it  into  question.  It 
was  for  them  the  primal  assumption 
and  clearly  the  result  of  the  deepest 
reason.  But  do  we  find  it  reasonable 
in  this  day?  This  question  leads  us 
to  look  at  the  ambiguity  of  the  word 
“reason.”  If  “reason”  is  used  to 
designate  a  Weltanschauung  which 
is  broad  enough  to  include  not  only 
the  intellectual  reaction  but  the  mor¬ 
al  consciousness  together  with  the 
aesthetic,  then  we  can  say  that  there 
is  nothing  whatever  against  it.  It  is 
only  when  reason  is  narrowed  down 
to  the  bare  Verstand  or  understand¬ 
ing  that  the  mind  finds  difficulty  in 
comprehending  it. 

Mr.  Balfour  has  made  a  great  mis¬ 
take  in  opposing  reason  to  authority 
when  really  the  latter  should  include 
the  former.  Certainly,  man  craves 
authority.  He  yearns  to  submit  his 
private  will  to  a  deeper  will  or  to  sub- 


46 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


ordinate  himself  to  something1  higher 
than  his  fragmentary  ego.  But  this 
whole  process  involves  reason.  Au¬ 
thority  sometimes  rests  upon  utility, 
as  in  the  case  of  the  relation  of  an  of¬ 
ficer  to  his  men,  but  it  is  reason  with¬ 
in  man  that  proclaims  loudly  that  it 
is  the  best  for  him  to  subordinate 
himself  as  a  bare  item  in  a  whole,  be¬ 
cause  it  appears  to  him  intrinsically 
right.  Thus,  when  man’s  private 
will  rebels,  his  rational  will  exercises 
coercion  upon  him  to  which,  in 
moments  of  insight,  he  is  perfectly 
willing  to  submit.  Thus,  as  Dr. 
Strong  remarks,  there  is  always  an 
element  of  consent  in  authority  al¬ 
though  individual  feeling  is  not,  in 
every  case,  considered. 

John  Stuart  Mill  had  the  impres¬ 
sion  that  no  belief  such  as  the  Per¬ 
sonality  of  God  should  be  impressed 
upon  the  young.  But  this  course 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM  47 

would  be  a  great  handicap,  as  it  would 
refuse  to  the  young  person  knowl¬ 
edge  of  his  own  deepest  will.  No 
young  person  understands  fully  his 
own  deepest  meaning  or  what  is 
needed  to  fulfil  his  nature.  It  must 
be  revealed  to  him  by  the  coercion  of 
rational  thought  impressed  from 
without  as  well  as  reinforced  from 
within.  Since  the  majority  of  man¬ 
kind  never  attain  the  mentality  nec¬ 
essary  for  independent  judgment,  it 
seems  altogether  rational  for  men  to 
bow  to  reasonable  authority  in  great 
questions  whose  answers  already  dis¬ 
play  the  light  of  reason.  Authority 
must  not  be  considered,  then,  in  op¬ 
position  to  reason.  It  is  not  the  “rival 
and  opponent  of  reason.”  It  is  not  a 
“non-rational  cause  ....  which  pro¬ 
duces  its  results  by  psychic  processes 
other  than  reasoning.”22  We  are  not 


22  Vid.  “Foundations  of  Belief,”  p.  219,  Balfour. 


48 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


pushed  on  by  a  series  of  non-rational 
causes  to  a  belief  in  a  personal  God. 
Reason,  as  inclusively  defined,  comes 
first  upon  the  scene  but,  in  the  sense 
of  clear  mentality,  manifests  itself 
late  in  the  development  of  man.  But 
the  fact  that  it  appears  late  is  no  in¬ 
dication  that  it  does  not  appear,  in 
some  degree,  earlier.  Hoffding  makes 
authority  depend  upon  the  preserva¬ 
tion  of  the  values  of  human  person¬ 
ality.  This  is  a  purely  subjective 
viewpoint.  While  Balfour  lays  too 
much  stress  upon  the  absence  of  the 
rational  in  authority,  Hoffding  em¬ 
phasizes  a  standpoint  that  clearly 
leads  to  subjectivity.  Authority 
must  include  rationality  although 
this  quality  may,  by  no  means,  be  evi¬ 
dent  to  the  majority  that  accept  it. 
It  must  also  include  an  element  of  ex¬ 
ternality  as  well  as  subjective  con¬ 
sent. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


49 


The  Kantian  notion  of  “pure  rea¬ 
son”  has  no  foundation  in  reality. 
Reason  is  never  pure  and  never  has 
had  that  characteristic.  If  Kant  had 
not  circumscribed  reason  so  narrowly 
and  enclosed  it  in  such  narrow  com¬ 
partments,  he  would  have  had  less 
difficulty  in  reaching  reality  and 
would  not  have  been  led  into  so  many 
contradictions  in  the  explication  of 
his  system.  Reason  is  a  broad  con¬ 
cept  and  must  be  made  to  include  the 
activities  of  the  moral  and  aesthetic 
life  and,  when  it  is  thus  considered 
and  the  greatest  of  all  problems  is 
under  investigation,  the  personality 
of  God  is  acknowledged  to  be  the  ul¬ 
timate  category  for  reasonable  men. 
In  man,  as  Garvie  says,  it  is  properly 
conceived  as  “progressive”  but  in  God 
it  is  “perfect.”23  But  so  strong  is  the 


23  Vid.  “Handbook  of  Christian  Apologetics,”  p.  19. 


50 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


rational  demand  for  it  that  in  its  ab¬ 
sence  life  is  greatly  weakened  and 
entirely  dissatisfied.  Man’s  person¬ 
ality  is  “temporal;”  God’s  personality 
is  “eternal.”  “Man’s  thoughts  are 
consecutive,  God’s  thoughts  are  the 
truths  which  neither  originate  nor 
pass  away;  they  are  the  laws  of  na¬ 
ture,  the  determinant  factors  of  all 
that  happens.”24 

(a)  Limitation  of  God. 

The  chief  objection  to  the  appli¬ 
cation  of  personality  to  Deity  is  that 
it  is  said  to  limit  the  Holy  One  of  Is- 
real.  Fichte  comes  up  for  notice  here. 
In  his  Wissenschaftslehre  which  pro¬ 
duced  such  a  ghostly  impression  up¬ 
on  Kant,  he  conceived  the  world  as 
constructed  entirely  out  of  self-con¬ 
sciousness,  and  in  his  Ueber  den 


24  “Personality,”  p.  64,  Paul  Carus 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


51 


Grund  unseres  Glaubens  an  eine  got 
tlicheWeltregierung he  took  occasion 
to  define  “God”  as  the  “living'  and  op¬ 
erative  moral  order”  of  the  world  in 
which  every  individual  had  his  defi¬ 
nite  place.  Personality  in  both  man 
and  God,  he  considered,  presupposed 
a  limiting-  object.  Heg'el  dismissed 
divine  personality  for  the  same 
reason  and  yet  he  found  the  Absolute 
limiting-  itself  in  various  other  ways. 
On  the  other  hand,  many  teachers  of 
today  hold  that  in  its  fullest  sense 
personality  can  be  ascribed  to  the  In¬ 
finite  only.  Paul  Carus  makes  him 
super-personal  in  a  sense  that  we  can¬ 
not  accept  for  he  asserts  that  God’s 
personality  and  man’s  “are  different” 
not  in  degree  but  in  kind.”25  Certainly, 


25  Vid.  “Personality,”  p.  64,  Paul  Carus.  See  also 
“Personality,  Human  and  Divine,”  by  Illingworth.  See 
also  “God,”  p.  194,  by  Paul  Carus  where  he  denies  the 
existence  of  a  personal  God  as  well  as  that  of  an  “ego 
soul.” 


52 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


Yahveh  has  said:  “My  thoughts  are 
not  your  thoughts,  etc.”  but  this 
might  only  refer  to  the  infinite  grasp 
of  his  mind  while  the  divine  attri¬ 
butes  that  satisfy  men’s  hearts  must 
be  akin  to  their  own  and  not  entirely 
different. 

Personality,  in  general,  is  not  limi¬ 
tation.  Certainly,  by  contrast  with 
an  external  object  man’s  feeling  of 
the  self  is  emphasized  but  there  is  a 
core  of  feeling  within  him  from  the 
very  first.  It  is  this  core  of  feeling 
that  the  realist  finds  so  difficult  to  ex¬ 
plain;  it  is  this  illumination  of  the 
organism  that  he  would  like,  if  pos¬ 
sible,  to  relegate  to  the  “mind  with¬ 
out.”  There  are  certain  “proprio-cep- 
tive”  sensations  that  belong  to  man 
which  do  not  depend  primarily  upon 
external  stimulus.  “My  mind  posses¬ 
ses  sense-contents  that  cannot  be 
similarly  presented  in  any  other 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


53 


mind.”26  In  pleasure  and  pain  there 
is  also  an  indication  of  the  self  alto¬ 
gether  apart  from  the  confrontation 
of  the  subject  by  an  object.  Again, 
in  scientific  investigation  the  scien¬ 
tist  is  very  careful  to  eliminate  what 
he  calls  the  personal  equation.  In 
ordinary  life  a  summation  of  opin¬ 
ions  in  which  the  subjective  element 
is  prominent  is  sufficient  to  carry  one 
along,  but  science  seeks  to  make  ac¬ 
curate  and  trustworthy  records  of  the 
natural  phenomena  investigated. 
The  effort  is  to  make  personal  knowl¬ 
edge  impersonal.  Thus,  great  stress 
is  laid  upon  “records”  which  give  the 
results  of  many  investigations  by 
various  eminent  men. 

In  psychology  also  the  investiga¬ 
tor  must  make  due  allowance  for  the 

26  “Present  Philosophical  Tendencies,”  p.  293,  Perry. 
For  a  mort  radical  treatment  of  mind,  see  “The  Concept 
of  Consciousness,”  pp.  183,  184,  Holt. 


54 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


element  mentioned  above.  The  scien¬ 
tist,  therefore,  whether  in  the  inves¬ 
tigation  of  individual  experience, 
as  in  psychology,  or  in  dealing  with 
experience  in  general,  as  it  ap¬ 
pears  in  the  external  world,  has  al¬ 
ways  recognized  that  there  is  a  core 
of  individual  experience  which  hin¬ 
ders  the  unbiased  and  accurate  rec¬ 
ord  of  external  phenomenal  facts. 
This,  of  course,  needs  the  light  of 
reason.  Yet,  at  the  same  time,  it  is 
a  sense  nucleus  upon  which  a  per¬ 
sonality  can  be  built. 

Personality  in  God  is  unlimited  and 
perfect  and  may  not  need  an  exter¬ 
nal  object  to  constitute  its  reality  and 
those  sense-experiences  and  proprio¬ 
ceptive  sensations  which  Couturat 
relegated  to  the  “rubbish  and  resi¬ 
duum”  of  the  mind  may  be  just  a 
hint  of  what  this  personality  might 
include.  Again,  the  notion  of  a  di- 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM  55 

vine  intellectual  intuition,  referred 
to  by  Kant,  by  which  God  freely  gen¬ 
erates  his  own  objects  and  thinks 
them  into  being  himself,  renders  un¬ 
necessary  the  conclusion  that  per¬ 
sonality  limits  the  Divine. 

John  Stuart  Mill  in  the  first  half  of 
the  ninteenth  century,  wrote:  “The 
evidences,  therefore  of  Natural  The¬ 
ology  distinctly  imply  that  the  author 
of  the  Kosmos  worked  under  limita¬ 
tions.”27  The  very  notion  of  design 
he  considers  to  be  sufficient  evidence 
against  omnipotence.  But  Stuart 
Mill  has  left  out  of  account  the  con¬ 
ception  of  self -limitation  by  purpose. 
A  being  who  could  not  limit  himself 
would  be  less  than  a  human  personal¬ 
ity  for  the  latter  finds  little  difficulty 
in  doing  this.  Every  rational  being 
who  works  at  all,  works  according  to 


27  Vid.  “Three  Essays  on  Religion,”  p.  137. 


56 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


some  plan.  That  plan  may  be  con¬ 
ceived  by  himself  or  impressed  from 
without.  To  work  according-  to  the 
plan  of  another,  would  indicate  limi¬ 
tation  but  to  act  according-  to  one’s 
own  plan  would  not  suggest  anything 
of  the  kind.  Suppose  an  omnipotent, 
rational  being  decided,  by  his  own 
free  will,  to  refrain  from  external 
activity  and  to  do  nothing  but  delib¬ 
erate,  he  would  be  planning  or  de¬ 
signing  and  his  design  would  be  to 
abstain  from  external  activity  such 
as  he  would  exercise  in  creation  and 
merely  to  think.  His  thought  would 
be  according  to  some  plan  or  design, 
whatever  the  outline  of  that  design 
may  be.  Thus,  design  is  no  dispar¬ 
agement  of  omnipotence.  Purposive 
limitation  is,  thus,  what  we  would  ex¬ 
pect  of  a  being  with  ethical  attributes 
interested  in  his  dependent  creatures. 

Bosanquet  found  purpose  every- 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


57 


where  in  external  or  non-organic  na¬ 
ture  for  as  the  Divine  Being  worked 
in  nature  he  worked  according  to  a 
systematic  and  coherent  plan.  The 
finite  mind  in  looking  at  nature  exter¬ 
nal  to  itself  would  thus  behold  a 
mechanism  and  the  concept  of  mech¬ 
anism  is  considered  to  be  in  no  sense 
incompatible  with  the  concept  of  tele¬ 
ology.  “Below  consciousness”  in  na¬ 
ture,  teleological  work  is  constantly 
going  on  as  well  as  “above  conscious¬ 
ness”  in  Providence  and  the  design 
of  a  finite  mind  is  only  a  reflection  of 
the  purpose  of  the  Whole.  Bosan- 
quet’s  standpoint  in  general  is.  of 
course,  different  from  ours  but  he  has, 
nevertheless,  effectively  shown  that 
purpose  does  not  imply  limitation  but 
that,  as  it  is  reflected  in  finite  minds, 
it  must  be  acknowledged  to  be  the  re¬ 
sult  of  the  wisdom  of  an  Absolute 
Being. 


58  IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 

(b)  Anthropomorphism. 

No  man  can  think  without  some 
degree  of  anthropomorphism.  Thus, 
no  special  blame  should  be  attached 
to  the  theist  if  he  introduces  this  char¬ 
acteristic  into  his  thought  concerning 
God.  F.  C.  S.  Schiller  assures  us  on 
the  one  hand,  that  it  is  impossible  to 
clear  our  thoughts  from  this,  and  thus 
we  should  glory  in  it.  On  the  other 
hand,  Paul  Carus  warns  us  that  its 
presence  is  nothing  short  of  a  griev¬ 
ous  taint  that  must  be  gotten  rid  of, 
especially  in  our  thoughts  concerning 
God.  “God  as  the  absolute  unity  of 
the  formative  factors  of  the  world, 
the  ultimate  norm  of  all  existence  in 
its  superreal  eternality,  is  not  in  need 
of  consciousness  and  could  not,  with¬ 
out  gross  anthropomorphism,  be  said 
to  be  conscious  of  himself.”28  Dr. 


28  Vid.  “God,  an  Enquiry  and  a  Solution,”  p.  232. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


59 


Carus  fails  to  realize  here  that  the 
process  of  anthropomorphization  has 
been  going  on  in  the  human  mind 
from  time  immemorial.  Man  can  un¬ 
derstand  his  world  only  in  so  far  as 
there  is  harmony  between  his  think¬ 
ing  and  it.  The  very  categories  that 
he  uses  in  dealing  with  the  phenom¬ 
enal  world  are  his  own  categories. 
They  get  most  of  their  meaning  from 
the  depths  of  his  own  will  and  cannot 
be  barely  a  copy  of  that  which  he  finds 
in  nature.  We  cannot  help  agreeing 
with  Professor  Ladd  that  “causal  con¬ 
nections”  as  referred  to  the  objective 
world  are  just  as  anthropomorphic  as 
“the  animism  of  the  savages.”  A 
law  of  nature  such  as  causation  can¬ 
not,  then,  compel  or  forbid  anything. 
The  thorough-going  scientific  mind 
finds  great  satisfaction  in  purely 
mechanical  causation  and  why  should 
it  not,  since  this  law  is  the  outcome  of 


60 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


the  rational  will  itself.  The  law  of  cau¬ 
sality  need  not  be  universal  but  it  is 
highly  convenient  to  apply  it  univer¬ 
sally.  The  fact  that  we  do  not  apply 
it  to  God  himself,  shows  what  liberty 
we  have  in  its  use. 

If  the  phenomenal  world  yields  up 
its  mysteries  on  condition  of  the  ap¬ 
plication  of  the  categories,  which  are 
indeed  intimately  connected  with 
man’s  rational  will  and  are  shot 
through  with  human  desire  to  con¬ 
quer  reality,  why  should  these  ra¬ 
tional  constructs  be  entirely  helpless 
when  the  value  of  the  whole  is  con¬ 
sidered?  Is  it  not  enough  to  show 
that  man’s  entire  rational  nature 
demands  a  knowledge  of  the  Being 
who  initiates  all  and  controls  all  and, 
when  God  is  conceived  in  the  light  of 
that  which  is  most  precious  to  man 
when  his  nature  is  at  its  highest 
stretch,  the  knowledge  afforded  must 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


61 


approximate  truth.  We  can  concede 
to  F.  C.  S.  Schiller  that  in  thinking'  it 
is  impossible  to  “abstract  from  the 
personality  of  the  knower.”29  But  we 
might  add  that  in  so  far  as  that  per¬ 
sonality  rises  to  the  heights  of  ration¬ 
ality,  it  would  be  a  renunciation  of 
reality  altogether  to  try  to  escape 
from  it  for  the  God  concept  is  the  re¬ 
sult  of  our  deepest  rational  will. 

Consider  how  man  is  deprived  of 
those  things  that  are  dearest  to  him, 
if  he  follows  the  mechanical  ideal  and 
refuses  to  be  anthropomorphic  in  re¬ 
spect  of  his  God.  Deprive  him  of  an¬ 
thropomorphism  in  the  above-men¬ 
tioned  sphere  and  immediately  all  his 
ideals  become  bare  mental  images 
and  loyalty,  reverence  and  relig¬ 
ion  are  degraded  to  the  level  of  “Fik- 


29  Vid.  “Studies  in  Humanism,”  p.  95. 


62 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


tionen.”™  and  he  is  guilty  of  what 
Vaihinger  calls  “dev  Verwandelung 
Subjektiver  Denkvorgcinge  in  objek 
live  W  eltvorgange 

Through  the  long  process  of  de¬ 
velopment,  man  has  gradually  formu¬ 
lated  his  categories  and  ideals  and 
has  finally  discovered  the  region  of 
true  values.  Man,  as  a  spiritual  sub¬ 
ject,  has  from  the  first  been  deeply  in¬ 
terested  in  that  which  would  best  pre¬ 
serve  his  being.  He  has,  thus,  as 
Tiele  remarks,  been  constantly  devel¬ 
oping  his  self-consciousness,  and,  ac¬ 
cording  to  his  mental  level,  constantly 
seeking  harmony  between  the  vari¬ 
ous  interests  of  his  being.  When  he 
reached  a  certain  stage  of  intelli¬ 
gence,  he  demanded  that  which  on  a 
lower  level  he  saw  no  necessity  of, 
namely,  harmony  between  science 

30  Vid.  “Die  Philosophic  des  Als  Ob,”  pp.  4-12,  Vaih¬ 
inger. 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


63 


and  religion,  and  between  morality 
and  religion,  but  what  he  was  seeking 
was  really  a  satisfied  or  harmonious 
self-consciousness.  Having,  then, 
reached  the  stage  of  intelligence  on 
which  he  now  stands,  is  he  willing  to 
throw  overboard  his  ideals,  renounce 
his  deepest  loyalties  and  give  up  his 
religion?  Standing  on  a  table-land 
of  thought  towards  which  he  has 
struggled  for  ten  thousand  years,  is 
he  willing  to  step  down  altogether  or, 
having  attained  this  eminence,  will 
he  not  rather  scan  the  horizon  of  the 
rarified  atmosphere  until  he  gains  a 
clearer  view  of  the  City  of  God? 

When,  man  refuses  to  anthropom¬ 
orphize  in  respect  of  his  God  he 
places  himself  in  a  position  similar  to 
that  of  Ludwig  Feuerbach  who  in  his 
Gedanken  ueber  Tod  und  Unster- 
blichkeit  referred  to  the  Gods  as 
creations  of  the  human  will  or  of 


64 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


man’s  wishes^  Wunchwesen)  and  im¬ 
mortality  (Unsterblichkeit )  as  a  sub¬ 
jective  idea  designed  merely  to  give 
man  comfort  here  below.  The  Abso¬ 
lute  Spirit  of  Hegel  was  in  this  view 
degraded  to  the  subjective  spirit  of 
man  and  religion  and  loyalty  became 
nothing  but  marks  of  sheer  weakness 
on  the  part  of  human  beings. 

All  the  pragmatistic  writers  would 
fully  agree  with  this  standpoint,  for 
with  them  man  is  caught  within  the 
circle  of  his  own  experience  and  finds 
it  impossible  to  grope  his  way  out. 
Within  this  circle,  God  is  said  to  be 
just  what  he  is  “known-as.”  He  is  a 
name  for  something  that  happens 
within  individual  experience,  namely 
for  the  good  consequences  that  flow 
from  the  belief.  Love,  reverence 
and  loyalty  as  directed  Godwards  are 
attitudes  of  hope  or  of  long-distance 
optimism.  Self-consciousness  and 


THE  BACK-BONE  OF  THEISM 


65 


self-control,  as  ascribed  to  God,  are 
again,  on  this  view,  purely  projections 
— characteristics  that  the  human  soul 
would  wish  him  to  have — for  with 
these  possessions  he  would  be  better 
fitted  to  render  help  to  humans  who 
may  be  in  need  of  it,  and  would  be 
better  able  to  win  their  respect.  But 
Pragmatism  is  a  self-contradiction 
and  thus  unworthy  to  be  called  a  phil¬ 
osophy.  Thus,  its  ideas  here  do  not 
merit  much  attention  and  man’s  onto¬ 
logical  consciousness  will  finally 
bring  about  its  death. 


CHAPTER  III 


Absolutism  and  Personality 

There  have  been  so  many  different 
forms  of  Absolutism,  that  we  shall 
have  to  restrict  ourselves  to  the  doc¬ 
trines  of  a  few  of  the  most  noted  ex¬ 
ponents  of  Absolute  Idealism  and 
shall  deal  with  this  system  only  as  it 
touches  personality  directly  or  re¬ 
motely.  So  many  writers  of  repute 
have  taken  in  hand  to  state  and  op¬ 
pose  this  doctrine  that  it  would  be  out 
of  place  just  here  to  attempt  any 
lengthy  argument  on  the  subject. 
Absolutism  taken  in  isolation  from 
Idealism  is  very  old  and  refers  to  an 
attempt  to  take  the  highest  ideal  that 
the  mind  can  conceive  and  to  con¬ 
struct  out  of  it  a  metaphysical  object. 
Thus,  Plato  was  an  absolutist  with  his 


68 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


metaphysical  ideal  conceived  as  “the 
Good”  and  Spinoza,  in  more  modern 
times,  belonged  to  the  same  class  be¬ 
lieving  in  the  reality  of  an  “Infinite 
Substance.”  Upon  the  basis  of  Kant’s 
objektive  Einheit  der  Apperception 
Hegel  built  his  “Absolute  Idea,” 
transforming  it  into  a  metaphysical 
entity  whence  came  the  “Absolute 
Ideal  Experience”  of  Joachim,  the 
“Absolute  Unity”  of  Bosanquet,  the 
“Inscrutable  Reality”  of  Bradley  and 
the  “Absolute  Will”  of  Royce  and 
Munsterberg. 

(1)  Block  Universe. 

Professor  James,  I  think,  was  the 
first  to  describe  Absolutism  as  the 
conception  of  a  “block  universe.”  It 
is  thus  described  because  the  uni¬ 
verse  is  conceived  as  being  a  com¬ 
plete  network  of  relations.  There 
are  no  loose  ends  anywhere  for,  on 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  69 

this  view,  everything  is  caught  with¬ 
in  the  grasp  of  one  complete  mind. 
Mr.  Joachim  reminds  us  that  “there 
can  be  one  and  only  one  such  experi¬ 
ence:  or  only  one  significant  whole  . 
.  .  .  For  it  is  absolute  self-fulfil¬ 
ment,  absolutely  self-contained  signi¬ 
ficance,  that  is  postulated.”31  Royce 
practically  agrees  that  “reality”  is 
an  “absolutely  organized  experience” 
which  is  a  life  or  will  that  is  once  for 
all  completed.  Man  takes  his  place 
as  a  bare  item  in  the  life  of  this  Ab¬ 
solute  Being  that  repudiates  every¬ 
thing  not  itself  and  even  throws  its 
mantle  over  Satan  himself  for  evil  is 
regarded  only  as  a  necessary  incom¬ 
plete  stage  of  the  Completed  Life. 

Nothing  from  the  outside  can  pen¬ 
etrate  this  Absolute  Whole  for,  in¬ 
deed,  there  is  nothing  external  to  it 


31  Vid.  “The  Nature  of  Truth,”  pp.  78-79.  See  also 
“The  Conception  of  God,”  Royce,  LeConte,  Etc. 


70 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


for  all  relations  as  well  as  all  entities 
are  in  the  Absolute.  For  Lotze,  con¬ 
sciousness  came  as  an  afterthought 
to  unite  the  one  and  the  many.  That 
is,  the  world  was  once  a  manifold  and 
the  ego  proceeded  to  unify  and  relate 
its  disjointed  parts.  But  Lotze  was 
only  a  half-hearted  absolutist.  For 
Royce,  however,  if  there  ever  was  any 
disconnection  it  would  have  been  ut¬ 
terly  vain  to  try  and  bring  unity. 
Either  things  were  always  caught  in 
the  meshes  of  the  Over-mind  or  they 
were  always  loose  and  disconnected. 
Thus,  the  absolutist  must  have  all  or 
none. 

Certainly,  importance  and  reality 
are  closely  related  and  when  once  a 
person  discovers  that  which  is  of  the 
most  importance,  he  may  well  set  it 
down  as  the  real,  but  why  should  the 
conception  of  “absolute  unity”  be  of 
more  value  than  that  of  “identity”  or 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  71 


the  conception  of  the  “one”  be  of  more 
value  than  that  of  the  “many”?  To 
some  men,  as  for  instance  Nietzsche, 
individuality,  freedom  axidseparate- 
ness  are  the  great  and  valuable  con¬ 
ceptions  even  when  their  lives  are 
“fullest”  and  their  souls  “at  the  high¬ 
est  stretch”.  Nietzsche  would  be  the 
last  one  to  close  his  Byron  and  open 
his  Goethe.  Independence  was  the 
valuable  conception  for  him  as  it  is 
today  for  all  the  pragmatists.  The 
Uebermensch'was  an  out-an-out  an¬ 
archist  shaking  off,  as  soon  as  possi¬ 
ble,  all  absolute  relations  to  his 
brother  man  as  well  as  to  the  universe. 
He  was  as  heroic  as  Milton’s  Satan, 
never  regretting  anything  but  will¬ 
ing  to  repeat  his  acts  whenever  op¬ 
portunity  offered. 

McTaggart  reminds  us  that  or¬ 
ganic  unity  is  by  no  means  an  ade¬ 
quate  conception.  A  mighty  system 


72 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


with  every  part  mutually  determin¬ 
ing  every  other,  abstracts  all  courage 
from  us  and  fills  us  with  awe,  making 
man  seem  so  small  that  he  is  of  no 
more  value  in  the  universe  than  a 
chip  or  straw.  Such  a  system  is  not 
logically  necessary  for  the  finite  self 
is  not  so  full  of  contradictions  as  the 
absolutist  imagines.  It  is  possible 
for  a  finite  being  to  be  distinct  with¬ 
out  being  wholly  isolated,  or  he  may 
be  related  to  the  universe  without  be¬ 
ing  absolutely  caught  within  a  closed 
system.  In  fact,  the  realist  points 
out  that  relatedness  and  indepen¬ 
dence  are  entirely  compatible  and 
he  indicates  numerous  examples  in 
which  this  is  true.  The  principle 
of  contradiction  may  be  held  with¬ 
out  at  the  same  time  holding  that 
all  relations  are  in  the  Absolute  and 
all  truths  predicates  of  the  Absolute. 
The  principle  of  unity  may  be  ac- 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  73 


cepted,  as  for  instance,  Doctor  Ward 
accepts  it,  but  one  must  wait  for 
experience  to  find  out  the  kind  of 
unity  there  is  in  the  universe.  It  is 
nothing  short  of  an  imposition  to 
foist  an  Absolute  and  “systematic 
unity  of  things”  upon  the  thinking 
man  at  the  very  beginning  and  then 
try  to  make  every  other  proposition 
and  doctrine  fit  into  it.  The  princi¬ 
ples  used  are  not  of  such  a  nature  as 
to  absolutely  imply  one  another.  The 
mind  may  separate  them  and  yet  re¬ 
tain  its  rationality. 

(2)  Abstracts  Personality. 

By  defining  the  Absolute  as  an  In¬ 
finite  Will,  Professor  Royce  does  not 
refuse  super-personality  to  him  but 
the  logical  outcome  of  the  whole  sys¬ 
tem  abstracts  personality  in  any  ac¬ 
ceptable  sense.  Again,  as  Prof.  Mezes 
points  out,  this  being  has  only  a  modi- 


74 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


cum  of  spirituality.  “His  experience 
consists  of  a  vast  physical  universe 
with  its  myriads  of  mechanically 
whirling  atoms,  and,  tucked  away  in 
one  corner,  the  least  bit  of  spiritual 
life,  which  to  be  sure,  has  its  questions 
answered  and  its  desires  gratified.”32 
Certainly,  all  science  is  comprised  in 
this  being  as  well  as  all  feeling-con¬ 
tents  of  everything  that  has  consci¬ 
ousness  on  the  face  of  the  earth  but 
there  is  so  much  dead  or  sleeping  mat¬ 
ter  in  his  nature— parts  of  anAbsolute 
that  are  drunken  or  asleep  as  Hegel 
would  say — that  very  little  spiritual 
quality  remains  and,  with  all  this,  how 
can  such  a  being  find  satisfaction  and 
how  can  he  be  a  personality?  Cer¬ 
tainly,  as  Le  Conte  suggests,  if  you 
remove  the  “brain-cap”33  of  a  man, 

32  Vid.  “The  Conception  of  God,”  Royce,  LeConte, 
Howison,  Mezes,  p.  58. 

33  Ibid.  p.  67. 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  75 


you  cannot  see  anything-  there  but 
molecular  movements  and  “vibra¬ 
tions.”  You  cannot  see  a  soul,  a 
spirit,  a  personality  and  if  you  say 
that  a  spirit  or  personality  is  there 
you  simply  do  it  on  the  basis  of  inter¬ 
pretation.  Only  from  the  point  of 
view  of  the  thinker  himself  do  things 
seem  different  and  a  psychical  life 
be  felt.  It  is  the  same  with  phy¬ 
sical  nature  apart  from  man.  From 
man’s  normal  point  of  view,  nothing 
of  a  spiritual  nature  presents  itself 
in  the  cosmos,  but  he  is  sure  that  a 
personality— that  is  a  perfect  person¬ 
ality — is  there  and  somehow  related 
to  it. 

But  suppose  this  being  is  Absolute 
Thought  and  entirely  passive.  On 
such  a  basis  it  is  even  harder  to  ap¬ 
ply  personality  to  it,  for  self-direction 
or  purpose  is  an  attribute  of  person¬ 
ality  and  a  being  that  is  powerless 


76 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


and  passionless  can  hardly  attain  to 
this  level.  Professor  Royce  saw  this 
difficulty  and  inconsistently  meta¬ 
morphosed  his  Absolute  passionless 
Thought  into  a  Will.  One  can  hardly 
conceive  of  an  inactive  will.  Thus, 
the  Absolute  is,  after  all,  not  power¬ 
less  in  his  own  way,  for  in  all  knowl¬ 
edge  that  is  in  all  creation,  he  is  ac¬ 
knowledged  to  be  active. 

One  can  clearly  see  that  Royce’s 
system  although  “thicker”  than  other 
absolutistic  systems,  places  the  Ab¬ 
solute  on  such  a  level  that,  although 
it  is  an  Infinite  Will,  it  is  hard  to 
conceive  of  it,  even  in  this  light,  as 
a  personality.  In  fact,  Royce  him¬ 
self  hints  that  God  may  be  an  entire 
stranger  to  personality,  and  not  know 
what  it  means.  Personality  connotes, 
above  all,  self-direction  and  cannot 
be  a  bare  will  without  emotion.  If 
the  aesthetic  judgment  or  the  judg- 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  77 


ment  concerning  the  beautiful  ob¬ 
ject  in  any  particular  case  is  the  re¬ 
sult  of  will — activity  involving  the 
Absolute, — can  it  be  made  without 
emotion  on  his  part  or  if  we  are  right 
that  science  is  an  enthusiasm  for 
truth  and  religion  an  enthusiasm  for 
righteousness,  can  the  Absolute,  who 
is  also  involved  in  these,  escape  en¬ 
thusiasm  in  the  judgments  or  laws 
that  make  up  these  disciplines?  If 
so,  instead  of  being  greater  than  man, 
he  is  good  deal  less  for  he  does  not 
possess  that  which  to  man  is  of  much 
importance. 

What  does  Mr.  Bradley  have  to 
say  on  the  subject?  He  reminds  us 
that  the  “Absolute  is  not  personal, 
nor  is  it  moral,  nor  is  it  beautiful.” 
Thus,  the  effort  to  exalt  the  Divine 
Being  above  all  thought  and  above 
all  imagination,  removes  him  entire¬ 
ly  from  the  reach  of  human  beings, 


78 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


and  when  once  this  is  done,  the  mind 
drops  back  helplessly  in  the  struggle 
and  the  wings  of  the  passional  life 
are  closely  clipped. 

The  final  question  is:  which  is 
easier  and  more  satisfying  to  man’s 
total  life,  to  believe  in  a  personal 
Deity  whose  nature  is  not  exhausted 
in  the  world,  or  a  colorless  or  entirely 
transcendent  Will,  that  includes 
everything  and,  in  the  last  resort,  not 
only  repudiates  personality  for  itself, 
but  for  the  wills  that  are  dependent 
upon  it? 

Again,  as  we  have  seen,  Absolu¬ 
tism  also  refuses  personality  to  man. 
Royce  defines  a  finite  personality  as 
a  “will  to  do  something”34  and  dis¬ 
covers  that  the  chief  thing  about  this 
being,  is  dissatisfaction.  But,  after 
all,  he  is  said  to  be  only  a  fragment 


34  Vid.  “William  James  and  Other  Essays,”  p.  293. 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  79 


of  the  Absolute  and  his  longing  is 
only  a  slight  expression  of  the  Divine 
longing.  “In  me,  then,  God  is  dis¬ 
contented  with  his  own  temporal  ex¬ 
pression.”35  According  to  this,  God’s 
discontent  constitutes  individuality 
and  each  individual  is  considered 
barely  a  mode  of  Absolute  existence 
appearing  in  time.  “A  new  indivi¬ 
dual”  is  merely  a  new  kind  of  life- 
process.36  Again,  “Individuals  are 
all  the  various  expressions  of  the  Ab¬ 
solute,  in  so  far  as  they  are  many.”37 

Although  Royce  makes  man  mere¬ 
ly  an  item  in  an  absolute  system,  yet 
he  often  speaks  of  him  as  if  he  had  a 
reality  all  his  own.  The  pronoun  “I” 
as  the  expression  of  a  self -directing 
personality,  occurs  everywhere  in  his 


35  Op.  Cit.  p.  295. 

36  Vid.  “The  World  and  the  Individual,”  Vol.  II,  p.  448, 
308,  Royce. 

37  Ibid.  336. 


80 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


books.  Thus,  “I  am  essentially  the 
wanderer,  whose  home  is  in  eter¬ 
nity.”38  Again,  “My  duty,  I  myself 
must  do  .  .  .1  am  discontent  with 
my  personality.”39  These  express¬ 
ions,  and  similar  ones  all  throughout 
his  works,  are  hardly  consistent  with 
the  position  that  “the  world  is  the  ex¬ 
pression  of  a  single  will.”40  If  the  lat¬ 
ter  is  true,  there  can  be  no  real  self- 
direction  or  freedom  in  any  individual 
and  man’s  reality  consists  in  his  being 
a  small  wavelet  of  the  Infinite  Ocean 
which  rises  up  from  the  surface  for 
a  moment  and  then  sinks  back  once 
more  into  its  bosom.  His  only  un¬ 
iqueness  consists  in  the  fact  that  he 
is  a  particular  part  of  an  Absolute 
Whole.  In  making  these  remarks, 

38  Vid.  “William  James  and  Other  Essays,”  p.  295, 
Royce. 

33  Op.  Cit.  p.  292,  295. 

40  Op.  at.  p.  274. 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  81 


we  are  not  exaggerating  the  situation 
but  simply  following  James’  sugges¬ 
tion  and  placing  ourselves  at  the  cen¬ 
ter  of  this  man’s  “philosophic  vision” 
and  not  depending  on  any  post-mor¬ 
tem  method. 

Mr.  Bradley,  whose  philosophic 
vision  it  is  hard  to  acquire  and  much 
harder  to  agree  with,  attempts  to 
criticise  out  of  existence,  many 
things  that  are  very  useful  to  us, 
because  they  lack  the  perfection 
that  is  found  in  the  perfect  experi¬ 
ence  of  the  Absolute.  Every  concep¬ 
tion  that  he  examines,  such  as  time 
and  space,  exhibits  the  relational 
form  and,  because  of  this,  they  are 
forever  condemned.  Chief  among 
the  conceptions  criticised  by  Mr. 
Bradley,  is  that  of  human  personality, 
to  which,  indeed,  the  relational  form 
is  a  necessity.  Whatever  the  history 
of  the  conception  may  be,  it  is  certain 


82 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


that  modern  society  cannot  dispense 
with  it  and  yet  hang  together.  With¬ 
out  it  there  can  be  no  freedom  and 
without  freedom,  there  can  be  no 
goodness  and  man  becomes  a  me¬ 
chanical  item  in  a  vast  closed-in  sys¬ 
tem.  It  acts  not  only  as  the  origina¬ 
tor  of  valuations,  but  also  as  a  norm, 
for  the  process  of  valuation.  Pro¬ 
fessor  Bosanquet  gets  his  norm  for 
truth  from  human  personality,  for  he 
in  many  places,  insists  that  truth  has 
the  character  of  individuality.  Also 
Bradley  will  have  it  that  reality  is 
individual.  The  conception  of  indi¬ 
viduality  here  is  not  merely  logical. 
It  gets  its  ground  and  support  from 
the  experience  of  human  personality. 
Although  the  above  writers  have 
naively  used  the  conception  as  thus 
originated  and  supported  and  used  it 
as  an  instrument  to  make  clear  their 
conceptions  of  Deity,  they  repudiate 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  83 


its  reality  as  belonging  to  man.  That 
is,  they  repudiate  the  source  of  their 
chief  conception  of  Deity,  and,  there¬ 
fore,  acknowledge  that  they  do  know 
what  individuality  is. 

The  difficulty  that  both  Bosanquet 
and  Bradley  find,  is  in  the  definition 
of  the  boundaries  of  the  self.  Thus, 
Bosanquet  compares  it  to  a  crystal 
forming  in  a  solution,  with  the  impli¬ 
cation,  that  the  self  is  as  much  a  part 
of  the  environment,  as  a  crystal  is  of 
the  solution  from  which  it  is  drawn. 
There  is  no  disgrace,  he  thinks,  in  re¬ 
ducing  the  contents  of  the  soul  to  the 
environment  for  the  deepest  spiritual 
souls  have  done  so.  Mr.  Bradley  dif¬ 
fers  somewhat,  from  Bosanquet,  in 
that  he  holds  that  no  part  of  reality, 
whatever,  has  any  existence  outside 
of  finite  centres  of  experience,  and 
reality  is  experience  and  nothing  else. 
The  Absolute  would,  thus,  be  the  ab- 


I 


84 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


solute  unity  of  these  finite  experi¬ 
ences.  But  he  holds,  that  the  boun¬ 
daries  of  the  self  are  altogether  con¬ 
fused,  so  that  no  one  can  tell  where 
they  are  or  how  far  they  reach.  Prof. 
James  has  shown  how  hard  it  is  to 
mark  out  these  boundaries.  The  ma¬ 
terial  self,  he  reminds  us,  includes, 
first  the  body,  then  the  clothing,  the 
immediate  family,  the  home,  and  ex¬ 
tends  as  far  as  one’s  bank-account. 
The  spiritual  self  as  felt,  however,  is 
reduced  to  “a  collection  of  cephalic 
movements  of  ‘adjustments’.”41  But 
James  acknowledges  that  “over  and 
above  these”  there  is  an  obscure  feel¬ 
ing.  But  there  is  no  need  of  singling 
out  the  self,  as  the  one  entity  in  all 
creation,  that  exhibits  confused  and 
indefinite  boundaries.  Where  in  the 
whole  of  all  experience  do  we  find  de- 


41  Vid.  “Psychology,”  Vol.  1,  pp.  305  ff. 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  85 


finiteness  in  this  respect?  Sense-ex¬ 
periences  come  to  us  in  a  mass  and 
have  the  faculty  of  “boiling1  over” 
very  often,  so  that  we  cannot  tell 
where  they  begin  or  end.  Therefore, 
the  self  cannot  be  singled  out  as  the 
only  entity  that  has  indefinite  boun¬ 
daries  and  this  objection  is,  thus,  il¬ 
legitimate. 

Man’s  rational  nature  demands  a 
unity  of  reality,  but  it  is  not  driven 
to  an  absolute  unity,  that  is,  it  is  not 
forced  to  a  particular  kind  of  unity 
much  less  to  a  unity  that  makes  any 
true  personality  impossible.  There 
is  a  unity  in  the  whole,  we  are  sure, 
but  that  unity  is  of  such  a  nature  as 
to  leave  room  for  permanent  person¬ 
ality  without  which  there  can  be  no 
preservation  of  values  and  no  ulti¬ 
mate  hope  for  man.  There  is  a  unity 
in  the  whole,  but  inclusive  reason,  or 
reason  defined  as  embracing  the  total 


86 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


reaction  of  man’s  spiritual  nature, 
demands  that  there  be  room  also  for 
freedom  of  activity,  both  human  and 
Divine. 

(3)  It  Deprives  of  Morality  Both 
Man  and  God. 

Mr.  Hobhouse  has  shown  very 
clearly  that  Absolute  Idealism  saps 
“intellectual  and  moral  sincerity”  and 
“softens  the  edges  of  all  hard  con¬ 
trasts  between  right  and  wrong, 
truth  and  falsity.”42  This  indictment 
is  a  correct  one,  in  the  face  of  what 
absolutists  have  said  concerning  evil. 
For  instance,  Bosanquet  tells  us  in 
substance,  that  there  is  room  in  the 
divine  perfection  for  all  evil.  And 
once  more  he  assures  us,  that  pain, 
sorrow  and  conflict,  are  essential  in¬ 
gredients  of  reality.  That  is,  ac- 


42  Vid.  “Democracy  and  Reaction/’  pp.  78-79,  L.  T. 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  87 


cording-  to  this,  the  Absolute  Being  is 
perfect  within  itself  and  yet  pain 
and  sorrow  and,  in  a  word,  evil,  have 
their  place  somehow  within  it.  Here 
Eucken’s  “Either-or”  comes  clearly  to 
the  front.  Evil  must  be  either  out¬ 
side  the  Absolute  Being,  or  within  it. 
If  it  is  within  it,  it  is  impossible  for  it 
to  be  perfect;  if  it  is  without  it,  then 
it  cannot  include  all,  and  is  not  abso¬ 
lute. 

Royce  holds,  that  evil  can  be  de¬ 
fined  as  anything  that  is  repugnant 
to  anybody.  That  is,  it  is  conceived 
as  opposition  to  purpose  or  will.  For 
instance,  pain  is  evil,  if  there  is  some¬ 
one  to  whom  it  is  repugnant,  if  there 
is  some  will  that  it  opposes.  The 
problem  is  merely  the  problem  of 
finitude.  Man  is  a  fragment  of  an 
Absolute  Will,  and  he  meets  with  op¬ 
position  as  he  goes  about  his  task  and 
this  opposition  is  regarded  by  him  as 


88 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


an  evil.  But  in  the  last  resort  on  this 
view,  the  distinction  between  good 
and  evil  fades  entirely  away. 

Every  thorough-going  Monism 
such  as  the  system  of  Parmenides  and 
Spinoza  tends  to  make  little  of  the 
distinction  between  good  and  evil. 
Bradley,  Bosanquet  and  Royce,  are 
not  behind  in  this  tendency.  The 
levelling  effect  is  the  same  in  all.  It 
is  essentially  nonsensical,  they  think, 
to  say  that  a  thing  is  bad  or  should 
be  other  than  it  actually  is  for  moral 
distinctions  have  only  a  relation  to 
beings  in  time.  Goods  and  bads  can 
be  restated  merely  as  degrees  of 
reality.  The  final  criticism  of  them 
is,  that  they  belong  to  the  world  of  ap¬ 
pearances  and,  as  soon  as  man  can 
throw  the  light  of  his  understanding 
upon  them,  the  distinction  between 
them  vanishes  away.  The  great 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  89 


thing-  is  to  understand,  for  to  under¬ 
stand  is  to  rise  above. 

Professor  Mezes  has  pointed  out 
very  clearly,  that  Absoluteness  or 
Completeness  and  Goodness,  are  in¬ 
compatible.  A  Being-  who  is  abso¬ 
lutely  complete,  comprising-  the  past, 
present  and  future  in  one  “luminous 
moment,”  is  certainly  without  pro¬ 
gress,  without  struggle,  without 
achievement,  and  therefore,  without 
morality.  The  only  moral  good  that 
we  have  any  hint  of,  is  won  with  dif¬ 
ficulty  in  the  face  of  struggle.  It  is 
hard  to  define  goodness  achieved 
otherwise.  If,  then,  it  is  true  that 
goodness  demands  struggle,  progress 
and  growth,  the  Absolute  is  not  good 
but  simply  complete,  and  self-satis¬ 
fied. 

Can  a  Deity  who  does  not  possess 
goodness  or  the  personality  that  is  the 
requisite  of  goodness,  satisfy  the 


90 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


modern  mind?  Can  a  Being-  that 
sees  no  distinction  of  kind  between 
good  and  bad,  be  of  comfort  to  us  in 
an  earthly  struggle  that  has  upon  it 
all  the  marks  of  being  real?  Can 
a  God  “possessed  with  a  devil,”  win 
our  respect?  No,  even  if  evil  is  an 
illusion,  we  are  face  to  face  with  the 
illusion  and  this  illusion  itself  is 
nothing  short  of  an  evil.  Again,  a 
universal  illusion  does  not  fall  far 
below  a  reality.  Finally,  a  God  that, 
like  Jonah’s  whale,  swallows  every¬ 
thing  that  comes  its  wray,  whether 
contradictions  or  non-contradictions, 
turmoil  or  peace,  good  or  evil,  digest¬ 
ing  all  with  equal  relish  and  pronoun¬ 
cing  them  all  good,  fails  to  arouse  any 
moral  enthusiasm  in  the  human 
breast.  The  abstracting  of  moral 
goodness  from  God  and  the  minimiz¬ 
ing  of  our  moral  judgments  in  gen¬ 
eral,  are  fatal  defects  in  Absolutism 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  91 


of  an  idealistic  kind  for  our  moral 
nature  is  just  as  fundamental  as  our 
scientific.  If  man’s  nature  is  to  be 
fundamentally  and  essentially  satis¬ 
fied,  he  must  not  hesitate  to  apply  his 
moral  postulates  any  more  than  he 
hesitates  to  apply  his  scientific,  for 
the  world  is  not  only  a  rational  order 
but  a  moral  order.  Science  is  by  no 
means  discouraged  because  it  finds 
much  apparent  confusion  in  the 
sphere  in  which  it  deals,  neither 
should  religion,  because  of  the  so- 
called  evils  it  encounters  in  investi¬ 
gating  the  moral  order  of  the  world. 
To  be  entirely  consistent,  man  must 
hold  just  as  strongly  to  his  moral  and 
religious  principles  as  to  his  scientific. 

The  theistic  conception  of  Infi¬ 
nite  Goodness,  which  flows  from  the 
conception  of  Divine  Personality,  can 
be  justified  as  well  as  the  conception 
of  Infinite  Rationality.  The  reason 


92 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


why  men  in  general  are  not  so  sure  of 
the  former  as  of  the  later,  is,  that  the 
former  has  not  had  so  many  un¬ 
biased  investigators  as  the  latter. 
In  their  religious  enthusiasm,  earnest 
men  of  the  past  have  accepted  with¬ 
out  question,  the  religious  postulate, 
not  considering  it  necessary  to  try 
and  discover  the  rational  basis  for  it, 
while  men  with  scientific  enthusiasm 
have  gone  to  work  in  a  cold-blooded 
and  critical  manner  and  have  not 
hesitated  to  question  the  scientific 
postulate  when  appearances  were 
against  it.  Most  scientific  men,  how¬ 
ever,  see  very  clearly  today,  that 
without  this  postulate,  true  science 
must  come  to  an  end.  Again,  the 
necessities  of  physical  life  on  the 
planet  are  increasingly  demanding 
man’s  attention,  and  the  more  earn¬ 
estly  he  turns  to  present  comforts 
and  physical  well-being,  the  less  en- 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  93 


thusiasm  he  acquires  to  seek  the  vin¬ 
dication  of  the  theistic  postulate. 

The  path  by  which  this  conception 
as  well  as  the  conception  of  person¬ 
ality  can  be  justified,  is  indicated  by 
Immanuel  Kant.  Although  a  Divine 
Will  of  Infinite  Goodness  is  not  ad¬ 
mitted  by  him  as  possible  to  reason  in 
its  theoretical  use,  yet  in  his  great 
work  on  The  Practical  Reason ,  he 
opens  the  way  for  the  discovery  of 
such  a  Will,  apart  from  the  mechan¬ 
ical  use  of  the  formal  categories. 
The  reasonable  will,  he  asserts,  does 
not  hesitate  to  postulate  the  exis¬ 
tence  of  objects  that  are  not  amend¬ 
able  to  the  scientific  and  mechanical 
activity  of  the  mind.  That  is,  Kant 
acknowledges,  that  the  will  of  man 
breaks  the  bounds  set  by  the  pure 
reason,  levels  the  barriers  placed  by 
itself  for  a  particular  purpose  and 
reaches  objects  of  supreme  impor- 


94 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


tance  beyond.  The  evidence  in  this 
new  sphere  of  knowledge,  Kant 
thinks,  is  stronger  than  in  the  theo¬ 
retical,  for  when  he  asserts  that  it 
is  necessary  to  “remove  knowledge 
in  order  to  make  room  for  faith,”  he 
means  by  faith,  a  knowledge  not 
weaker  than  the  theoretical,  but 
stronger.  In  a  sense,  then,  Kant 
admits  that  speculative  reason  is 
subordinate  to  practical.  This  he 
calls,  the  primacy  of  the  practical 
reasonf Primal  der  praktischen  Ver 
nunft )  •  That  is,  the  understanding 
and  will  are  not  co-ordinate  powers 
(Vermogen)  but  the  former  is  sub¬ 
ordinate  to  the  latter. 

Apart  from  Kant’s  handicap  of 
building  upon  the  discredited  faculty 
psychology  of  the  past  with  its  gaps 
in  human  nature,  his  position  would 
be  very  near  that  of  Pragmatism. 
The  psychology  of  the  gaps  influenced 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  95 


him  in  making  theoretical  knowledge 
completely  theoretical  and  practical 
knowledge  purely  practical.  With 
this  mechanical  method,  one  does  not 
run  into  the  other.  With  a  more 
modern  psychology,  however,  in  his 
possession,  he  would  have  found  it 
very  easy  to  follow  the  path  now  trod¬ 
den  by  Pragmatism.  Dr.  Schiller 
never  tires  of  reiterating  the  fact 
that  it  is  useless  to  make  the  intellect 
oppose  the  will  or  vice  versa  for  the 
very  forms  of  the  intellect  are  in  the 
last  resort,  forms  of  the  will.  The 
will  appears  to  be  concerned  in  every 
act  of  intellect  and  the  whole  human 
being  is  involved  in  every  act  of 
knowledge. 

The  idea  of  the  bill  of  rights  of 
the  human  will,  suggested  by  Kant 
with  a  grudging  mind,  and  carried  to 
its  logical  conclusion  by  James  and 
Schiller,  is  today  by  no  means  the  ex- 


96 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


elusive  possession  of  pragmatistic 
writers.  Neo-Hegelianism  in  Ameri¬ 
ca  has  assimilated  all  that  is  good  in 
the  doctrine  and  yet,  is  not  compelled 
to  alter  essentially  any  part  of  the 
fundamental  basis  of  its  philosophy. 
Even  Green,  Bradley  and  Bosanquet 
have  repudiated  bare  formalism  and 
Professor  Royce  has  given  the  will  a 
most  prominent  place  in  his  epistem¬ 
ology.  In  the  realm  of  psychology, 
Ward  and  Stout  have  repeatedly  em¬ 
phasized  the  purposive  nature  of 
mental  life.  In  fact,  the  whole  of 
present-day  philosophy  tends  to  in¬ 
clude  feeling  and  will  in  its  consid¬ 
eration  of  the  world  of  reality.  This 
is  very  noticeable  in  the  works  of  such 
men  as  Eucken,  Paulsen,  Weber  and 
Andrew  Seth.  Every  movement  of 
consciousness  seems  to  be  directed  to 
some  end  and  involves  some  purpose. 

Aristotle’s  characterization  o  f 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  97 


man  as  “thinking  desire”  shows  that 
this  is  by  no  means  a  novel  stand¬ 
point.  Sturt  regards  the  construc¬ 
tive  judgment  as  always  exhibiting  a 
purpose  and  Wundt  hits  the  nail  on 
the  head  when  he  remarks:  “Will  is 
not  merely  a  function  which  some¬ 
times  accrues  to  consciousness,  and  is 
sometimes  lacking;  it  is  an  integral 
property  of  consciousness,”43  and  Pro¬ 
fessor  Dewey  will  hear  nothing  else 
but  that  consciousness  is  so  closely 
connected  with  will  that  in  order  to 
extinguish  the  will,  consciousness 
would  have  to  die  also.  Thus,  it  is 
universally  acknowledged  that  there 
is  no  conscious  activity  without  pur¬ 
pose. 

The  close  student  of  the  Kantian 
system  can  see  shining  through  all 
the  mental  gaps  and  lines  of  demar- 


43  Vid.  “Ethics,”  English  tr.  Ill,  p.  7,  Wundt. 


98 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


cation,  the  tacit  acknowledgement  of 
the  activity,  through  all,  of  the  hu¬ 
man  will.  The  “show  world”  comes  not 
by  chance,  but  man’s  rational  will 
produces  it.  If  that  “show-world,” 
as  systematically  ordered,  is  the  re¬ 
sult  of  the  functioning  of  categories 
not  derived  from  experience,  why 
should  these  categories  be  confined 
to  the  world  of  experience?  Why 
should  they  not  be  applied  to  objects 
beyond  experience,  that  is,  to  God  and 
to  those  human  attributes  that  de¬ 
pend  upon  him? 

Kant  either  did  not  see  the  solu¬ 
tion  clearly  enough  to  give  a  very 
lucid  answer,  or  his  faculty  psycho¬ 
logy  kept  him  back.  Nevertheless, 
as  we  hinted  before,  Kant  actually 
filled  the  gaps  that  he  had  previously 
made,  for  the  essential  and  active 
will,  working  according  to  fixed  laws 
in  the  scientific  world,  finally  broke 


ABSOLUTISM  AND  PERSONALITY  99 


down  all  barriers  and  reached  reality 
outside  the  realm  of  mechanism.  The 
essential  will,  not  satisfied  with  what 
it  created  or  discovered  by  means  of 
its  own  mechanical  laws,  reached  be¬ 
yond  and  gained  an  insight  into  the 
realm  where  God,  Freedom  and  Im¬ 
mortality  had  their  being. 

Thus,  Kant  is  actually  on  our  side 
when  we  say  that  the  fundamental 
will  is  involved  in  all  consciousness, 
that  is  to  say,  reason  in  its  widest  and 
fullest  sense  actually  possesses 
knowledge  of  a  Personality  of  Infinite 
Goodness.  The  key  that  fits  the  lock, 
although  accidently  discovered,  must 
be  the  right  key.  Thus,  this  postu¬ 
late  fits  human  nature  so  well  and 
satisfies  it  so  thoroughly  that  it  must 
be  fundamental,  that  is,  it  must  be 
true. 


IV 

Conclusion 


It  has,  I  think,  been  made  reason¬ 
ably  clear  to  the  thinking  mind  that 
the  Divine  Being  is  spiritual  and  not 
material.  For  matter  to  define  the 
essence  of  the  Most  High  is  a  contra¬ 
diction  in  terms  for  matter  is,  by  no 
means,  man’s  highest  concept  when 
his  life  is  fullest  and  his  soul  at  its 
highest  stretch.  Even  the  pregnant 
concept  of  substance,  notwithstand¬ 
ing  Spinoza,  is  inadequate,  for  it  is 
much  too  vacuous  to  satisfy  the  intel¬ 
lect  and  too  dead  to  stimulate  the 
emotions.  Such  instrumental  con¬ 
cepts,  when  applied  to  the  Deity,  do 
not  command  the  moral  respect  and 
support  of  humanity.  Man’s  God 
cannot  be  of  the  nature  of  the  clod 


102 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


that  he  treads  under  his  feet.  He 
must,  in  some  way,  be  akin  to  his  own 
highest  nature  and,  at  least,  reach 
the  level  of  spirituality.  If  he  fail 
in  this,  he  is  entirely  disqualified  for 
his  office.  When  once  he  is  acknowl¬ 
edged  to  be  on  such  a  level,  the  hu¬ 
man  heart  and  intellect  acquire  and 
retain  a  certain  deep  satisfaction,  for 
a  source  of  ethical  communication  is 
now  considered  possible  and  man,  in 
the  midst  of  life’s  struggles,  can  look 
to  such  a  One  for  sympathy  and  help. 

The  amount  of  spirituality  that 
Absolute  Idealism  leaves  to  both  man 
and  God  is  so  narrow  that  the  mind, 
not  constitutionally  absolutistic,  re¬ 
volts  against  this  way  of  defining 
such  beings.  Such  a  view  leaves  man 
with  a  bare  spark  of  ephemeral  spirit¬ 
ual  existence  and  God  with  a  vast 
nature  consisting,  in  its  outward 
reach,  of  moving  stars  and  planets, 


CONCLUSION 


103 


plunging  with  incredible  swiftness 
through  the  vast  abysses  of  dark 
space  and  in  its  inside  reach  of  move¬ 
ments  of  millions  of  whirling  atoms 
and  electrons,  but  possessing  only  a 
tiny  modicum  of  spiritual  life  attach¬ 
ed  to  a  comparatively  few  organized 
beings.  The  essential  spiritual  life  of 
the  universe  is  thus  so  small  an  item 
that  it  might  escape  the  notice  of  the 
Absolute  altogether.  Why  this  vast 
amount  of  dead  and  sleeping  reality? 
How  can  we  excuse  a  drunken  Deity 
when  the  best  among  men  always 
practise  sobriety?  Can  it  be  that  man 
is  more  spiritual  and  has  more  of  his 
nature  under  his  control  than  his 
Creator?  His  entire  being  repudi¬ 
ates  this  conclusion. 

Man  cannot  make  the  slightest 
advance  either  in  science,  philosophy 
or  religion,  without  interpretation. 
What  he  finds  in  science  is  a  few  facts 


104 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


carefully  tabulated,  the  rest  is  inter¬ 
pretation  on  the  basis  of  intellectual 
satisfaction.  Thus,  Oliver  Lodge,  in 
opposing  the  relativity  of  Einstein, 
reminds  us  that  we  can  only  observe 
matter  and  all  else  is  inference.  But 
we  cannot  even  observe  matter,  for 
matter  is  shot  through  and  through 
with  concept  stuff.  In  other  words, 
matter  is  an  interpretation.  We 
cannot  see  an  electric  current,  we 
only  observe  bodies  behaving  in  a 
certain  manner.  The  former  is  an 
interpretation.  No  man  has  ever 
sensed  an  electron,  an  atom  or  the 
ether.  They  have  all  come  in  a  simi¬ 
lar  manner. 

Philosophy  exhibits  the  same 
phenomenon.  Certainly,  here  the 
intellectual  reach  is  more  compre¬ 
hensive  but  the  same  instruments  are 
used.  Man  cannot  renounce  his  in¬ 
tellectual  tools  and  remain  rational. 


CONCLUSION 


105 


His  interpretation  is,  once  more,  on 
the  basis  of  satisfaction,  only  the 
scope  is  a  little  wider  for  now  he  must 
not  only  satisfy  the  intellect  but  the 
moral  and  emotional  life  as  well. 
James  has  truly  said  that  a  philoso¬ 
pher  that  fails  in  the  latter,  fails  en¬ 
tirely.  Thus,  in  this  important  field 
man  interprets  according  to  reason 
in  its  most  inclusive  aspect  and  in¬ 
evitably  conceives  his  God  as  spirit¬ 
ual. 

Again,  to  the  diligent  student  of 
historical  philosophical  thought,  it 
becomes  increasingly  clear  that,  for 
a  long  time,  the  intellectual  current 
had  been  setting  strongly  towards 
unity.  Such  a  momentum  character¬ 
ized  this  movement  that  in  Hegel  and 
the  other  great  rationalists,  the  flood 
overflowed  its  banks  submerging 
every  visible  and  invisible  object  un¬ 
til  sober  thought  discovered  that  such 


106 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


a  movement,  if  made  too  inclusive, 
would  bring  about  the  end  of  all  in¬ 
dividual  thought  and  action  and,  thus, 
submerge  the  philosopher  himself. 
Consequently,  the  thinking  man 
called  a  halt  to  this  way  of  regarding 
reality,  thoroughly  convinced  that 
total  unity  was  unnecessary  and  even 
actually  harmful.  He,  therefore, 
promptly  rejected  it  in  favor  of  a 
unity  that  allowed  to  the  individual 
sufficient  freedom  for  his  own  moral 
life. 

The  practical  mind  of  William 
James  rightly  rejected  at  once  the 
“block  universe”  of  Professor  Royce 
and  his  school,  for  he  saw  that,  if  at 
bottom  there  was  only  one  “absolute¬ 
ly  organized  experience,”  man’s  life 
was  only  a  bubble  on  the  wave  which 
burst  with  the  pressure  of  the  first 
slight  wind  upon  it,  never  to  be  re¬ 
formed  as  an  individual.  Certainly, 


CONCLUSION 


107 


man  would  always  be  a  part  of  the 
Absolute,  but  what  would  that  signify 
seeing  that  no  trace  of  him  as  an  in¬ 
dividual  would  ever  after  be  found 
except  perhaps  by  the  Absolute  it¬ 
self.  The  prize  of  a  completed  life 
with  no  rough  edges,  remote  from  the 
possibility  of  struggle,  would  be  a 
poor  substitute  for  continued  per¬ 
sonal  life  with  the  enjoyment  of  com¬ 
parative  freedom. 

Thus,  the  mind  at  its  highest  reach, 
rejects  Absolute  Idealism  once  and 
for  all,  and  it  does  so  on  the  basis  of 
the  concept  of  satisfaction  which  is 
indeed  only  another  name  for  impor¬ 
tance.  Whatever  seems  to  man,  in 
his  best  moments,  to  be  of  highest  im¬ 
portance  to  him,  will  be  related  to  and 
form  a  part  of  his  God  and  he,  in  most 
cases,  will  regard  himself  as  being 
logically  driven  to  postulate  this  at¬ 
tribute  of  Him.  Why  should  men 


108 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


regard  absolute  unity  as  all  impor- 
ant?  For  reasons  before  adduced,  it 
is  an  inadequate  category  and  it  is 
entirely  illegitimate  to  apply  it  to  the 
universe  at  the  very  beginning  of  in¬ 
vestigation  without  waiting  for  the 
further  report  of  experience.  What 
we  find  is  a  certain  grade  of  unity 
which  is  far  from  absolute.  A  limited 
unity  satisfies  best  both  intellect  and 
emotion. 

Pluralism  is  a  philosophy  that  con¬ 
ceives  the  universe  as  almost  entirely 
shattered.  It  does  not  teach  the  en¬ 
tire  lack  of  unity  but  believes  that 
since  only  certain  grades  are  found, 
man  should  take  his  cue  as  to  the  na¬ 
ture  of  the  whole  from  those  frag¬ 
mentary  experiences.  Things  are 
found  with  one  another,  thus,  there 
is  a  unity  of  “withness.”  Things  are 
humanly  known  together,  there  is, 
then,  “noetic  unity.”  Other  kinds  of 


CONCLUSION 


109 


unity  are  also  found,  but  the  pluralist, 
on  the  basis  of  his  empiricism,  abso¬ 
lutely  refuses  to  interpret  the  uni¬ 
verse  as  one. 

Some  pluralists  regard  the  world 
as  consisting  of  an  immense  group  of 
conative  individuals  or  centres  of 
consciousness.  It  is  considered  to  be 
entirely  spiritual  consisting  of  mon¬ 
ads  or  entelechies,  each  with  its  own 
experiences  with  different  degrees  of 
spiritual  clearness.  This  “piecemeal 
Idealism”  exhibits  certain  great  dif¬ 
ficulties.  Social  intercourse  and  the 
laws  of  nature  find  no  adequate  ex¬ 
planation  on  this  basis.  For  an  im¬ 
mense  multitude  that  no  man  can 
number  of  centres  of  consciousness 
to  agree  together  so  well  that  immu¬ 
table  laws  of  nature  could  be  evolved 
to  which  they  would  all  submit,  is  so 
miraculous  as  to  be  out  of  the  ques¬ 
tion.  Leibnitz’  law  of  continuity  is 


110 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


all  very  well  in  its  way,  but  for  the 
world  to  create  and  secure  obedience 
to  this  law  alone,  a  miraculous  and 
almost  inconceivable  adjustment  was 
necessary  among  untold  millions  of 
centres  of  consciousness.  If  every 
monad  is  entirely  different  from 
every  other,  except  in  spiritual  es¬ 
sence,  how  is  it  possible  for  them  to 
agree  socially,  so  as  to  be  able  to  live 
together?  Lotze  saw  the  difficulty 
here  and  brought  in  the  Absolute 
Being  as  the  necessary  condition  of 
interaction.  But  with  the  Absolute 
came  another  difficulty,  namely  the 
abstraction  of  individual  freedom. 
Lotze  did  not  realize  the  truth  that  a 
Spiritual  World  Ground  that  is  not  an 
Absolute,  was  sufficient  to  explain 
this  wonderful  phenomenon.  His 
interpretation  failed  because  it  ig¬ 
nored  both  moral  and  emotional  sat- 


CONCLUSION 


111 


isfaction  and  trusted  the  bare  intel¬ 
lect. 

Bare  Pluralism  is,  thus,  an  unfin¬ 
ished  doctrine,  defective  both  in  its 
starting-point  and  in  its  forward 
reach.  It  also  involves  other  difficul¬ 
ties  such  as  the  pre-existence  of  souls 
and  some  thinkers  have  even  regard¬ 
ed  it  as  self -contradictory.  Be  this  as 
it  may,  the  chief  practical  difficulty 
under  which  it  labors  is  that  it  so 
deeply  disappoints  the  human  soul 
which  seeks  a  Divine  Being  who  is 
powerful  enough  to  make  His  ideals 
prevail.  Theism  furnishes  this  Being 
as  the  spiritual  foundation  of  the 
world.  He  is  not  merely  one  among 
many,  however,  powerful,  but  a  Will 
that  directs  the  universe,  spiritual,  in¬ 
telligent  and  personal,  upon  whom  all 
lesser  wills  depend,  but  not  in  such  a 
way  as  to  abstract  all  freedom. 


112 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


In  respect  of  personality,  either 
in  man  or  God,  we  must  again  turn  to 
the  only  open  door,  namely,  reason¬ 
able  interpretation.  No  man  has 
ever  found  a  self,  either  human  or 
divine.  Sense  experience  never  pre¬ 
sents  it.  Certain  fragmentary  ex¬ 
periences  appear  in  human  life  with 
some  kind  of  a  vague  nucleus  and 
man  flies  at  once  to  the  citidal  and  as¬ 
serts,  without  doubt,  that  he  is  a  per¬ 
sonality.  This  satisfies  his  life  and 
affords  dignity.  If  he  could  remove 
the  “brain-cap”  of  the  universe,  he 
would  find  no  spirit  or  soul  or  mind 
only  certain  persistent  and  regular 
movements  as  might  be  discovered  in 
the  human  brain.  If  he  followed  the 
Baconian  method,  championed  today 
by  Einstein  and  Steinmetz,  and  con¬ 
tented  himself  with  bare  description, 
he  would  waste  his  life  for  nothing. 
No,  he  begins  to  interpret.  His  en- 


CONCLUSION 


118 


tire  nature  demands  a  satisfactory 
interpretation.  He  concludes,  with 
certainty,  that  he  is  in  contact  with 
and  vitally  related  to,  a  Supreme  Per¬ 
sonality  that  consciously  directs  the 
whole  and  gives  stability  to  his  life. 
Notwithstanding  Leuba,  man  will 
never  accept  an  “impersonal  substi¬ 
tute”  for  Deity  for  his  entire  nature 
rebels  against  such  a  being. 

The  tendency  of  science  is  to  de¬ 
personalize,  to  neglect  the  individual 
in  favor  of  general  law.  Philosophy, 
although  of  universal  scope,  always 
returns  to  the  individual,  and  finally 
discovers  that  the  fundamental  scien¬ 
tific  laws  take  their  rise  from  certain 
more  essential  laws  deeply  entrench¬ 
ed  in  the  human  mind.  Pragmatism 
claims  that  they  begin  here  and,  thus, 
have  a  lowly  origin.  But  the  rational 
mind  looks  deeper  for  their  origin  and 
conceives  them  as  indicating  the  acti- 


114 


IS  GOD  A  PERSONALITY? 


vity  of  a  Divine  Will.  So  then,  phil¬ 
osophy  has  no  quarrel  with  science 
but  urges  it  to  do  its  best  to  bring  to 
light  new  laws,  but  it  calmly  and  with 
assurance  remarks:  “All  your  laws  go 
back  essentially  to  the  same  source. 
They  have  as  their  backbone,  certain 
fundamental  categories  that  are  so 
deeply  entrenched  in  the  human  mind 
that  all  intelligent  expression  comes 
to  an  end  without  them.  Decide  not 
to  use  them  and  man’s  intelligent 
activity  will  dwindle  to  the  mere 
pointing  of  the  finger.”  Since  mod¬ 
ern  logic  has  brought  to  light  those 
all-important  laws,  the  intelligent 
mind  would  be  recreant  to  its  duty  if 
it  did  not  point  out,  with  all  assurance 
that  they  belong  to  a  Divine  Will, 
manifesting  itself  in  the  human. 

Finally,  man  is  more  influenced  by 
moral  ideals  than  by  the  physical 
pressure  of  heat  and  cold.  Their  in- 


CONCLUSION 


115 


fluence  in  his  life  is  very  real.  If  the 
real  is  that  of  which  the  consciousness 
must  take  account,  they  are  indeed 
realities  and  require  a  mind  for  their 
existence.  The  fragmentary  minds 
of  individuals  are  not  a  sufficient 
home  for  them.  The  fact  that  the 
particular  ideals  are  all  ranged  un¬ 
der  a  universal  which  demands  that 
the  good  must  be  striven  after,  makes 
clear  to  us  that  there  is  a  moral  order 
and  that  it  is  a  part  of  real  Reality. 
The  physical  order  certainly  opposes 
man  in  his  struggle  for  the  ideal,  but 
this  also  is  according  to  purpose.  The 
two  orders  are  somehow  harmonized 
and  each  contributes  its  share  in  in¬ 
dicating  the  presence  of  a  personal 
and  unified  Deity. 


